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THE 



PARNELL MOVEMENT 



A SKETCH OF IRISH PARTIES 
From 18%3 



BY 



T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. 

AUTHOR OF 
LORD BEACONSFIELD, A BIOGRAPHY' 'GLADSTONE'S HOUSE OF COMMONS* STC 



AUTHORIZED EDITION. 



Jfll/ 



New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis : 

BENZIGER BROTHERS. 

18S6. 






By Transfer 
dUN • IW 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I. THE FALL OF O'CONNELL 



PAGE 

I 



II. THE COMING OF THE FAMINE . 

III. THE FAMINE . . . . . 

IV. THE GREAT CLEARANCES ...... 

V. THE GREAT BETRAYAL 

VI. RUIN AND RABAGAS 

VII. REVOLUTION 

VIII. ISAAC BUTT 

IX. FAMINE AGAIN ! 

X. THE LAND LEAGUE 

XI. THE COERCION STRUGGLE 407 

XII. THE IRISH NEMESIS , . . 472 

XIII. THE GENERAL ELECTION . . * 542 



16 
40 
66 
126 
168 
205 
229 
287 
315 



INDEX 



559 



THE 

PARNELL MOVEMENT. 

CHAPTER I. . 

THE FALL OF O'CONNELL. 

The main purpose of these pages is to describe the movement 
which is associated with the name of Mr. Parnell. That 
movement cannot, however, be understood without some ac- 
quaintance with other movements, of which it is the child and 
successor. To the history of events in our own day, I have 
thought it best, accordingly, to prefix a sketch of some of 
the events by which they were preceded and prepared. For 
various reasons I have deemed it sufficient to start at the 
year 1843. 

The Irish people may well be excused for the honour they 
paid to O'Connell after he had won for them Catholic Emanci- 
pation. When he arose, they were literally aliens in their own 
country. They could not hold land ; they could not take 
office ; they could only obtain education in the hedge school 
or on the Continent. At one sweep, O'Connell had dashed 
all these shackles from their limbs. The passionate prejudices 
of the greater and stronger nation were against the Catholics ; 
the Protestant section of their own countrymen held all the land 
and all the positions of trust and power ; they were unarmed, 
and opposed to them were all the resources by land and sea 
of one of the world's greatest empires : and against all this, 
O'Connell, by the sheer force of his intellect and with no 



2 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

other weapon than his voice, had succeeded. He was pro- 
claimed the Liberator of his country ; all other forces in the 
nation and all other men were overshadowed by his single 
name ; and he established, without the assistance of a bayonet 
or of a musket, an omnipotence over the democracy as un- 
questioned and unquestionable as that of a Czar with millions 
of soldiers behind him. 

It was not long before O'Connell and the nation found 
that the glories of Catholic Emancipation were but a mockery 
and an illusion. He had calculated that with this lever he 
would have been able to wring with promptitude all the other 
reforms which he deemed necessary ; and the evils for which 
he demanded redress were sufficiently pressing. The tithes 
still existed ; and the clergymen of the opulent Protestant 
Establishment gathered their dues of wheat from a poverty- 
stricken Catholic peasantry, backed by soldiers and police and 
guns, and sometimes amid scenes of mad passion and much 
bloodshed. O'Connell, in order to gain Emancipation, had 
committed the terrible mistake of consenting to the abolition 
of the forty-shilling freeholder : and this had taken away from 
the landlords one of the most effective reasons for sparing 
the tenant at will ; and evictions were perpetrated on an un- 
usually large scale. In short, the material condition of Ireland 
was worse in the years succeeding to what it had been for 
several years before the Act of Emancipation. 

O'Connell's attempts to change all this through the Im- 
perial Parliament proved miserably abortive ; he determined 
to enter on a new agitation — this time the object being, the 
Repeal of the Act of Union : and this brought the second of 
his great disillusions. He had throughout his career been the 
staunchest of Liberals : to every measure of Liberal reform 
he had given his passionate adhesion ; of the Reform Act of 
1832 he was one of the most effective advocates : and now 
the Liberal Party failed him. He had no sooner entered upon 
the agitation for Repeal of the Union than he came into 
collision with the representatives of English Liberalism in 
Ireland. The association which he founded was declared to 
be illegal ; the Marquis of Anglesey, the Liberal Lord-Lieu- 
tenant, proclaimed his meetings ; his letters were opened by 



THE FALL OF O'CONNELL 3 

the hands of Liberals in the Post Office l ; and he was finally 
brought by Liberal law-officers before an Orange judge and 
a packed Orange jury. Declining to plead, he was convicted ; 
but was never called up for judgment. It was under the ex- 
asperation caused by these high-handed acts that he hurled 
at the then Liberal Administration the words which have 
often since been quoted with rare delight by Irish speakers. 
He spoke of the Ministry as the 'base, brutal, and bloody 
Whigs.' 

But these experiences had their effect upon him ; and 
still more the bitter experiences he had in Parliament. He 
brought forward his motion (April 23, 1834) m favour of Repeal 
of the Union ; it was laughed at by both sides of the House ; 
and when he went into the lobby, he was supported by but 
40 votes. 

Then he made, perhaps, one of the worst, though one of 
the most natural, mistakes of his life. Instead of keeping the 
attention of his countrymen and of the Legislature fixed upon 
Repeal — which, if granted, involved the redress of every other 
grievance— he determined to reverse' the process. He tried to 
make the removal of other grievances the stepping-stone to 
gaining Repeal, instead of standing by Repea. as the be-all and 
end-all of national rights. He had an additional reason for 
hoping for the redress of grievances, in the promises of the 
Liberal statesmen of the period. They had declared over and 
over again their readiness to-place Ireland on a perfect equality 
with England; and O'Connell, before long, got strong evidence 

1 During the fierce excitement caused in 1845 by the opening of the letters of 
the Brothers Bandiera to Mazzini by Sir James Graham, a Parliamentary Return 
was ordered of the various ministers who had exercised the power of opening the 
letters of private persons. According to this return, Mr. Secretary Littleton 
(afterwards Lord Hatherton) had done so in 1834, and Lord Mulgrave (afterwards 
Marquis of Normanby) in 1835. ^ n l &36 tne same noble marquis inspected 
private Irish correspondence, with the assistance of Mr. Drummond, the Irish 
Secretary. In 1837 Mr. O'Connell's private letters to his friends were opened by 
order of Lord Chancellor Plunket and Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin and a 
Member of the Privy Council, the seals or envelopes being softened by the appli- 
cation of steam, and skilfully re-sealed after the letters had been copied. In 1838 
the same sort of espionage was carried on by Lord Morpeth (afterwards Lord 
Carlisle), in 1839 by Lords Normanby and Ebrington and General Sir T. 
Blakeney, and again by Lord Ebrington in 1840. — (Parliamentary Return, 
Session of 1845. Papers relating to Mazzini.) 



4 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of the reality of the promise. In spite of continued opposition 
by the Conservatives and of repeated rejections by the House 
of Lords, an Act was passed which threw open the municipal 
councils of Ireland to the Catholics; and which enabled 
O'Connell himself to be elected Lord Mayor of Dublin. The 
spectacle of their great leader clothed in the robes of the chief 
magistrate of the metropolis was a sight that proved delightful 
to the Catholics of Ireland at that period, in a way that few 
people can now understand. The Corporation of Dublin had 
been the great home of Orange Conservatism ; and its alder- 
men were among the most prominent spokesmen of the in- 
sulting and maddening creed of Protestant ascendency. To 
see O'Connell in the seat that up to this time had been 
uninterruptedly occupied by one of their bitterest enemies 
appeared to the people the visible sign of a momentous 
triumph. But here again a great concession was accompanied 
by a villainous proviso. Neither O'Connell nor the people, 
in their enthusiastic welcome of municipal reform, attached 
much importance to the condition that the appointment of 
the high sheriff should rest in the hands of the Crown. By- 
and-by the importance of the provision was brought home to 
O'Connell when he was placed on his trial ; and the high 
sheriff of Dublin, as the man charged with the impanelling of 
the jury, held O'Connell, and through O'Connell, the fate of 
all Ireland, in his grip. 

The grant of municipal reform by the Whigs once more 
threw O'Connell into their hands ; and he trusted that other 
reforms would follow. He spoke warmly on behalf of the 
ministry of Lord Melbourne ; and called upon the Irish 
people to rally around it. But in 1841 the period of Liberal 
ascendency came to an end ; and Sir Robert Peel — the bitter 
and uncompromising enemy of all Irish Reform — came to the 
head of the Government with a huge majority behind him. 
O'Connell lost all hope of redress from Parliament, and once 
more started the Repeal agitation. 

O'Connell's first move was to raise a debate on Repeal in 
the Corporation of Dublin. His speech on the occasion is 
regarded by competent critics as perhaps one of the finest of 
his whole life. It may still be read with advantage as an 



THE FALL OF O'CONNELL 5 

epitome of the case against the Union and as a syllabus of 
the hideous ruin which that ill-starred Act has inflicted upon 
the Irish people. A full and interesting description of it will 
be found in Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's ' Young Ireland ' 
(pp. 191-207). The chief antagonist of O'Connell on this 
occasion was a man who afterwards played an important part 
in Irish history and who will often appear in these pages. 
Isaac Butt, at this time a young man of thirty years of age, 
was the rising hope of the Irish Orange party, and was 
thought of so highly as to be put forward as protagonist to 
the great agitator. O'Connell's motion was carried by 45 
votes to 15. This debate gave the new agitation an extra- 
ordinary stimulus. The subscriptions rushed up from 239/. 
in March, the week after the debate, to 683/. in the beginning 
of May ; many classes of the population which had held back, 
flocked in ; a number of the bishops gave their adhesion to 
the movement either openly or silently ; and as time went on 
Repeal of the Union was the passionate cry of a unanimous 
nation. 

Doubt is still felt in many minds whether when he first 
started on this new enterprise, O'Connell really meant to per- 
severe with it ; or whether he intended to use the larger 
demand of Repeal as a lever for obtaining the smaller reforms 
of tenant right, the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and 
other reforms. Whatever his original motives, the story of 
the Repeal agitation, which he now started, was that it was 
strong almost from the very commencement ; that its strength 
increased in geometrical progression ; and that finally it 
reached proportions so gigantic that it controlled its leader 
instead of being controlled by him. 

The most significant and imposing sign of the hold which 
the new agitation took upon the country were the popular 
gatherings. These, from the immense numbers that attended 
them, came to be known as the ' monster meetings,' and pro- 
bably were the largest assemblages of human beings that a 
political cause ever drew together in the history of the world. 
These meetings were held in almost every part of Ireland, 
and gathered volume as they went along ; until at Tara, 
sacred with the most ancient and proud memories of the Irish 



6 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

nation, there was a demonstration which numbered half a 
million of human beings. 

The assembling together of so many hundreds of thou- 
sands of people, all inspired by the same thought, excited 
something like a national frenzy. The country was quivering 
in every nerve, and there was a state of excitement that 
made everybody anticipate a morrow either of complete 
victory or of an outbreak of baffled hate. The condition of 
England was one of excitement almost as intense. The 
attention of Sir Robert Peel was called in Parliament 
to these meetings by some of his Irish Orange followers ; 
and, after a certain amount of shillyshallying, he had dis- 
tinctly pledged himself that these meetings were seditious, 
and that the agitation for the Repeal of the Union should, 
if necessary, be drowned in blood. ' I am prepared,' he said, 
' to make the declaration which was made, and nobly made, 
by my predecessor, Lord Althorp, that, deprecating as I do 
all war, but above all civil war, yet there is no alternative 
which I do not think preferable to the dismemberment of this 
Empire.' 

The effect of these words was to exasperate public opinion 
on both sides of the Channel. It roused by insult the anger 
of the Irish people, and by provocation the anger of the Eng- 
lish. The two nations stood, in fact, opposed to each other, 
maddened by all the fierce national passions that immediately 
precede sanguinary warfare. 

It is O'Connell's action at this hour that has given rise to 
the most frequent and bitter controversies over his career. 
His enemies and many of his warmest admirers have ever 
since declared that he proved unequal to the situation ; that 
he had victory in his own hand, and threw it away, from want 
of courage and want of insight. 

He would be a very unsympathetic or a very unimagi- 
native man who would not pity the great agitator at this 
supreme crisis of his career. Never, perhaps, had a political 
leader graver difficulties, more perplexing problems — a re- 
sponsibility so vast, so overwhelming, so undivided. On the 
one side he saw the great resources of the Empire arrayed 
against him : and Peel and the Duke of Wellington had 



THE FALL OF O'CONNELL 7 

taken care that the reality of these resources should be 
brought home to the mind of O'Connell and the Irish nation 
in a manner the most galling and the most palpable. Troops 
were poured into the country until there were no less than 
35,000 men in Ireland ; and there were ships of war around 
the whole coast. O'Connell knew that to all this force he 
had nothing to oppose but the bare breasts of a brave but 
also an unarmed and an undisciplined people. On the other 
hand, there was the whole nation, with strained eye and ear, 
wanting something they knew not what — filled with wild 
hopes and passions, longings, and dreams. And high up- 
lifted above all these surging and strained millions he stood : 
worshipped as an inspired and resistless prophet ; omni- 
potent over their destinies, their hearts, their lives ; gigantic, 
solitary, most miserable. 

For it is now certain that at this period O'Connell knew 
moments of perhaps deeper anxiety than ever he had expe- 
rienced during the many chequered years of his previous life. 
When the last shout had died away ; when he had been pro- 
claimed, amid such tumults of cheers, the uncrowned King of 
Ireland, and he found himself once more with a single com- 
panion to whom he could show the nudity of his soul, he fre- 
quently uttered in a cry of anguish and despair, ' My God, my 
God ! what am I to do with this people ? ' 

His habits at this period throw a considerable light on his 
motives and on the history of his country. In spite of occa- 
sional laxity of moral conduct, he was all his life a devoted 
member of the Catholic Church ; and towards the end of his 
days, his daily life was that rather of an anchorite in a state 
of ecstasy than of a fierce politician in the midst of a raging 
and relentless struggle. He used not only to attend mass, 
but also to receive Holy Communion every morning of his 
life ; and it was marked as indicative of his whole theory of 
political duty, that he always wore on these occasions a black 
glove on his right hand — the hand that, having shed the blood 
of D'Esterre in a duel, was unworthy to touch even the 
drapery associated with the mysteries of his religion. 

On the other hand, there was the fierce democracy demand- 
ing excitement, encouragement, inspiration ; and O'Connell 



8 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

would have been more than human if the fumes of this 
incense from millions did not occasionally disturb his brain, 
and if he were not now and then carried away on the spring- 
tide of so vast and enthusiastic a movement. Finally, 
O'Connell's hot language was often the outcome of the cold 
calculation of a most astute, experienced, and successful 
politician. For Peel he had a feeling of both loathing and 
contempt. He thought him at once a hypocrite and a coward. 
His smile, he used to say, was like the silver plate on a coffin. 
With Peel and Wellington a bold game had been played 
before ; and had forced Catholic Emancipation, with hundreds 
of broken promises and abandoned principles, down their 
throats. The tactics that had won Emancipation, might win 
Repeal. 

These are the various considerations that account for the 
strange inconsistency of O'Connell's language and acts during 
this momentous time. At one meeting he spoke in terms of 
enthusiastic loyalty — indeed, he never was anything but loyal 
in his language to the throne — and he preached the doctrine 
that he would not purchase the freedom of Ireland by shed- 
ding one drop of human blood. Soon after, stung by some 
insult from the authorities to the people, he burst forth in 
language of vehement defiance. There was one speech of the 
latter kind which especially attracted notice, and afterwards was 
used against him with much effect. Speaking at the banquet 
in the evening after a meeting in Mallow, he used these remark- 
able words : 'Do you know,' said O'Connell, 'I never felt such 
a loathing for speechifying as I do at present. The time is 
coming when we must be doing. Gentlemen, you may learn 
the alternative to live as slaves or die as freemen. No ; you will 
not be freemen if you be not perfectly in the right and your 
enemies in the wrong. I think I see a fixed disposition on 
the part of our Saxon traducers to put us to the test. The 
efforts already made by them have been most abortive and 
ridiculous. In the midst of peace and tranquillity they are 
covering our land with troops. Yes, I speak with the awful 
determination with which I commenced my address, in con- 
sequence of news received this day. There was no House of 
Commons on Thursday, for the Cabinet were considering what 



THE FALL OF O'CONNELL 9 

they should do, not for Ireland, but against her. But, gentle- 
men, as long as they leave us a rag of the Constitution we will 
stand on ;t. We will violate no law, we will assail no enemy ; 
but you are much mistaken if you think others will not assail 
you.' (A voice, ' We are ready to meet them.') ' To be sure 
you are. Do you think I suppose you to be cowards or 
fools ? ' 

And a little later on in the speech he used almost the best- 
remembered words of his life : ' What are Irishmen,' he 
asked, ' that they should be denied an equal privilege ? Have 
we the ordinary courage of Englishmen ? Are we to be called 
slaves ? Are we to be trampled under foot ? Oh, they shall 
never trample me — at least (no, no), I say they may trample 
me, but it will be my dead body they will trample on, not the 
living man ! ' 

Whatever O'Connell may have meant by these words, the 
interpretation put upon them by at least all the young and 
enthusiastic and brave men of the country was that they were 
meant to be a threat of violence in answer to Peel's threat of 
violence. The Repeal movement was a constitutional move- 
ment, conducted by legal and constitutional methods, and if 
an attempt were made to deprive Irish citizens of their con- 
stitutional right of public meeting for advancing this move- 
ment, the attempt would be resisted by force. 

Meantime O'Connell's words became bolder and more 
encouraging as he went along. He declared at the monster 
meeting in Roscommon that the close of the struggle had 
almost come. 'The hour,' he said, 'is approaching, the day 
is near, the period is fast coming, when — believe me who 
never deceived you — your country shall be a nation once 
more.' l ' And this poetry of the orator/ sardonically adds 
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, ' was translated into unequivocal 
prose by Mr. John O'Connell at the next meeting of the 
association. " The Repeal of the Union," he declared, " could 
not be delayed longer than eight or ten months." ' 2 

The moment at last came when O'Connell's power and 
determination were to be put to the test. A meeting was 
announced for Sunday, October 5, at Clontarf — a suburb of 

1 Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland, p. 349. 2 lb. 



io THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Dublin made glorious in Irish hearts by the decisive victory 
of Brian Boru over the Danish invaders. The Ministry made 
up their minds to strike the blow which they had been long 
preparing : they proclaimed the meeting ; took every means 
to carry out their order by force — or, as some people even 
said, to provoke violence in order to make bloodshed inevit- 
able. The meeting had been in preparation for weeks ; but 
it was not until half-past three o'clock on the Saturday before 
the meeting that the proclamation was issued. It was only 
by the despatch of special mounted messengers that the 
people, who were swarming in from the surrounding country, 
were told of the action of the Government. 

There had already grown within the ranks of O'Connell's 
own following a section which bitterly differed from his 
policy and in time broke his power. The ' Nation ' newspaper 
had been founded in October 1842 by Mr., now Sir Charles 
Gavan Duffy, and he had among his assistants Thomas 
Davis, John Dillon, and subsequently John Mitchel. The 
Young Irelanders, as they were called, represented an 
entirely new phase in Irish politics. The 'Nation' for the 
first time presented the Irish people with a journal of real 
literary merit ; and the writers acquired an influence over 
the popular mind hitherto unknown in Irish journalism. 
Even in those days of high-priced newspapers and ill- de- 
veloped communication, it circulated largely in the remotest 
towns in Ireland. It was devoured, not read. It convinced ; 
it inspired ; it roused loftiest hopes and fiercest passions. 
The writers, joining the Repeal Association of O'Connell, 
soon brought a new force into its councils. In the first place 
they were determined not to submit with the same passiveness 
as was generally the custom to the dictatorship of O'Connell. 
This brought them into collision not only with O'Connell 
himself but with the formidable group of men he had 
gathered around him. Many of these intimates of the great 
agitator were broken in health and fortune and character ; 
but O'Connell stood by them with the natural constancy of 
a man of keen affections to old retainers ; and one of the 
bitterest quarrels between him and the Young Irelanders was 
for the continuance in salaried positions of these men. The 



THE FALL OF O'CONNELL II 

Young Irelanders made demands for the publication of 
accounts, which, though accompanied by strong professions 
of 'loyalty to O'Connell himself, produced, not unnaturally, 
irritation in his mind. In short, for the first time in his life, 
the experienced veteran found himself face to face with young 
foes who had not the same regard as their elders for his past 
services, who depended not on his will, and who wielded an 
influence outside his control. There was in addition to these 
causes of personal difference a more important and funda- 
mental difference of principle. The Young Irelanders main- 
tain that they were pushed by other forces, and especially by 
O'Connell himself, into the doctrine of physical force : at this 
moment the struggle over that question had not arisen. 
There was, however, the difference in the preference of the 
younger section for resolute, and of the older for moderate 
courses. 

John Mitchel, one of the Young Irelanders, writing many 
years after O'Connell's death, and in another land, deliberately 
repeated the opinion he held at the time as to O'Connell's duty 
on this day. ' If I am asked,' he writes, ' what would have been 
the very best thing O'Connell could do on that day at Clontarf, 
I answer : To let the people of the country come to Clontarf 
— to meet them there himself, as he had invited them ; but, 
the troops being almost all drawn out of the city, to keep the 
Dublin Repealers at home, to give them a commission to take 
the Castle and all the barracks, and to break down the canali 
bridge and barricade the streets leading to Clontarf. The 
whole garrison and police were 5,000. The city had a popula- 
tion of 250,000. The multitudes coming in from the country 
would, probably, have amounted to almost as many. . . . 
There would have been horrible slaughter of the unarmed 
people without, if the troops would fire on them — a very 
doubtful matter — and O'Connell himself might have fallen. 
... It were well for his fame if he had ; and the deaths of 
five or ten thousand that day might have saved Ireland the 
slaughter by famine of a hundred times as many.' 

These words represent the gospel of a large section of 
Irishmen for many a day afterwards ; they led to the almost 
contemptuous tone in which O'Connell's memory was treated 



12 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

by a vast number of his countrymen during a considerable 
period after the first outburst of worship after his death ; they 
formed the fundamental idea of the love of revolutionary 
methods and the hatred of Parliamentary leaders which is 
the undercurrent of much of the Irish history that followed ; 
above all, they added to the hideous disaster of 1846 and 
1847, another element of woe in the thought of what might 
have been. 

The immediate consequence was the break-up of O'Con- 
nell's mighty movement. He himself and several of his col- 
leagues were immediately afterwards prosecuted ; and the 
most shameful methods were adopted for obtaining a convic- 
tion. Out of the entire panel one slip, containing mostly 
Catholic names, was lost ; when finally there were left eleven 
Catholics out of a panel of twenty-four, the Crown used their 
full power of challenge, and every single one of the eleven 
was driven from the box ; and the jury consisted exclusively of 
Orange Conservatives, who were as impartial in deciding the 
case of O'Connell in these days as would be a jury of Southern 
slave-holders in the case of an Abolitionist immediately before 
the civil war in America. Then the judges were notoriously 
partisan. An accidental phrase is still remembered which 
brought this out in full relief. Chief Justice Pennefather, in 
alluding to the counsel for the defence, spoke of them as 'the 
other side.' Of course, before such a judge and such a jury, 
conviction was a foregone conclusion. Everybody cried out 
shame on the iniquitous proceedings ; O'Connell walked into 
the House of Commons amid the debate upon the trial, which 
was at the moment being denounced by English Liberals as 
vehemently as it could have been by himself. It was generally 
expected that the verdict would be reversed on appeal — as it 
was ; and an effort was made to have a bill passed which 
would have allowed O'Connell to remain out on bail until 
the case was finally decided. But the bill was rejected — 
principally through the efforts of Brougham, who had a violent 
hatred of O'Connell ; and the end of it all was that O'Connell 
had to go to gaol. This was the beginning of the end. 

But it did not look so at the time. In his prison O'Con- 
nell held levees more like those of a prince than the unofficial 



THE FALL OF O'CONNELL 13 

head of a democracy ; bishops, priests, town councillors, 
rushed to see him from all parts of Ireland. ' Here,' writes 
Mitchel of the imprisonment of O'Connell and his companions 
in Richmond, ' they rusticated for three months, holding levees 
in an elegant marquee in the garden ; addressed by bishops ; 
complimented by Americans ; bored by deputations ; sere- 
naded by bands ; comforted by ladies 5 half smothered with 
roses ; half drowned in champagne.' ' And when the case 
was brought before the Court of Appeal, the verdict was re- 
versed ; Chief Justice Denman denounced the proceedings of 
the law officers as reducing trial by jury to a 'mockery, a de- 
lusion, and a snare ' : and O'Connell was released from prison 
amid circumstances of wild triumph. 

But all the same, the fact remained that O'Connell's con- 
viction broke up his movement. The mighty dictator— to 
whom millions of men looked up, for whom thousands would 
have willingly died — had been dragged at the tail of a police- 
man ; and the hero of a thousand fights had been beaten for 
the first time in his life. The prestige of unbroken victory 
was gone. 

' The Repeal year,' as Mitchel pointedly puts it, ' had con- 
ducted, not to a parliament in College Green, but to a peniten- 
tiary in Richmond.' O'Connell, too, left the prison physically 
and mentally a broken man. It was discovered after his 
death that he had been for years suffering from softening 
of the brain, and the date generally assigned for the first 
appearance of the disease was that of his imprisonment. He 
was besides, as we have since learned, involved in domestic 
trouble. 2 

When the fearful excitement of the Repeal agitation had 
broken down his robust frame, he remained still the same to 
the people. But keen observers remarked the feebleness of 
his own defence at his trial ; and when he began to address 
meetings again after his release, he was noted to carefully 
avoid all subjects upon which the people were most eagerly 
desirous of information and direction. Here, again, most 
of the critics of O'Connell declare that he lost a great 

1 Last Conquests of Ireland. 

2 Duffy, Young Ireland, pp. 530-32. 



i 4 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

opportunity. Mitchel, and many men still living, and with 
the hot blood of youth cooled by mature years, declare that 
he ought to have called upon the people to make some 
stand, and that the people not only would have obeyed, 
but at the time panted for the word. The population of 
Ireland at this period was eight and a half millions ; and 
though there was terrible poverty in the country, there had, 
as yet, not been anything like universal starvation. The 
masses of men who marched to the demonstrations are uni- 
versally described as stalwart, bold, and well drilled ; and it 
is argued that by mere force of overwhelming numbers, and a 
frenzy that was national, they would have borne down the 
defences of the Government. In support of this view, and 
against the damning testimony of subsequent abortive 
attempts at insurrection, the argument is used that the means 
and methods of warfare have been revolutionised since that 
period. Soldiers in those days were armed with no better 
weapon than the ' brown-bess ' ; and, as an ancient revolu- 
tionary may now in many a part of Ireland be heard to 
exclaim, with a sigh : ' In those days every man had his pike.' 
The first charge might have killed hundreds ; but after the 
first charge, soldiers at that time would have been impotent 
against a resolute people a hundred-fold more numerous. 

But, wisely or foolishly, O'Connell was determined not to 
permit any bloodshed. His courage was proved on too many 
a scene to be open to question ; but it was not the desperate 
courage that stakes life, fortune, and a whole national issue 
upon a single cast of the die. Then his whole training had 
been that of a man who had found in words weapons more 
potent than armies and navies. The victories he had obtained 
were victories in law courts and in deliberative assemblies ; 
and possibly, and probably, he still honestly thought he would 
still be able to utilise the enthusiasm of the people in wring- 
ing from Parliament, if not Repeal, a blessing so great and so 
needed as security to the tenant-at-will from starvation and 
eviction. 

There was one fatal obstacle to his success in a Parlia- 
mentary movement ; and this is a fact which should always 
form a central consideration with those who criticise adversely 



THE FALL OF O'CONNELL 15 

O'Connell's career. The half million of people who gathered 
around him at Tara were not those to whom he had to 
appeal for the most potent weapon in the Parliamentary con- 
flict. He had to pass away from them to the miserable hand- 
ful of voters who had the fate of elections in all the smaller 
constituencies in their hands ; and at that time, and for many 
a day afterwards, personal interests begot of abject poverty, a 
spirit of clique or other mean or subsidiary motives, exercised 
deeper influence than great national issues. In the year 1843, 
when he was still at the very height of his power, his sup- 
porters in the House of Commons did not reach beyond the 
miserable total of twenty-six members. 

From this time forward the history of O'Connell is the 
history of Repeal decay. Arms Acts and Coercion Acts 
meantime took from the people what few weapons they had, 
and the Government filling gaols with prisoners, accelerated 
the break-up of that tide of passion, enthusiasm, and desperate 
courage, which, if taken at its flood, might then have led on 
to fortune. 

With disaster comes inevitable disunion. Between him 
and the Young Irelanders the quarrel that had been long 
smouldering had at last broken into open flame. Sir Robert 
Peel, by the concession of a larger grant to Maynooth, still 
further disintegrated the forces of O'Connell by bringing 
pressure on the Vatican, and through the Vatican on some of 
the bishops ; and so, O'Connell's power began gradually to 
melt away. 



16 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



CHAPTER II. 

THE COMING OF THE FAMINE. 

While thus all the national forces of Ireland were being 
reduced to impotence, there was coming over the country a 
calamity which was to complete the work of national de- 
struction ; to inflict on Ireland one of the most widespread 
and one of the most terrible disasters recorded in human 
history ; and to prove the need of a native legislature by the 
tragic testimony of a starving nation. 

There never was an event in human history which could 
have been more clearly foreseen, or that was more frequently 
foretold, than the Irish famine of 1 846 -47. The circumstances 
of which it was the final outcome had been in progress for 
centuries. The destruction of the Irish manufactures by the 
legislation of the British Parliament had thrown the entire 
population for support on the land ; and the fierce com- 
petition thus induced had raised the rents to a point far 
beyond anything the tenant could ever hope to pay. On the 
other side, the landlords, brought up to no profession, spend- 
thrift, separated from the tenant by creed, race, and caste, 
aggravated all the evils of the system. According to testi- 
mony as unanimous as that on any human affair, they left to 
the tenant the whole improvement of the farm : the fencing, 
the building of houses and offices — all the work that from 
time immemorial had been done in England by the landlord ; 
and then, when the tenancy was determined either by the 
lease or by caprice, they rewarded the tenant by eviction, or 
a rise in the rent. The complaints of the neglect of their 
duties by the Irish landlords run with a monotonous itera- 
tion through the extensive literature of the Irish land 
question. Spenser railed against the Irish landlord in 1596 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE r 7 

for his preference of tenancies at will to the grant of leases. 
The exactions of the landlords, and the terrible want thereby- 
caused among the people, suggested to Swift his perhaps 
most terrible satire — ' The Modest Proposal ' — and his bitterest 
passages. In 1729 Mr. Prior wrote a pamphlet to expose 
the evils which absenteeism inflicted. In 1 791, the Protestant 
bishop, Dr. Woodward, denounced rack-renting, and the ' duty- 
work ' which the landlords exacted ; and so on with scores of 
writers on the subject. 

The land question had been the stock subject of poli- 
ticians as of litterateurs ; innumerable Parliamentary com- 
mittees had sat and investigated and reported upon it. To 
begin with the period after the Union, a Parliamentary 
committee, appointed on the motion of Sir John Newport in 
18 19, reported that there was great want of employment : 
that the want of employment was due to the want of capital : 
and that the want of capital was caused on the one hand 
by the absenteeism of a number of the landlords, and on the 
other through the consumption of all their capital by the 
tenants on the improvement of their holdings. In 1823, 
another committee drew attention still more emphatically to 
the difference between the action of the English and the 
Irish landlords, and denounced strongly the prevalent rack- 
renting. In 1829 there was another committee which con- 
sidered a bill brought in by Mr. Brownlow in favour of the 
reclamation of waste lands and the drainage of bogs — a 
favourite remedy of those days. In 1830 a committee re- 
ported that ' no language could describe the poverty ' in 
Ireland, and recommended the settlement of the relations 
of landlord and tenant on ' rational and useful principles.' 

There is an equally embarrassing riches both of speeches 
and of bills. In November 1830, Mr. Doherty, the then 
Solicitor-General for Ireland, described the houses of the 
tenantry as such as the lower animals in England would 
scarcely, and as a matter of fact did not, endure. The Duke 
of Wellington denounced the evils of absentee landlordism in 
the same year ; and in the following year Lord Stanley — 
afterwards, as Lord Derby, the obstinate advocate of the 
landlord party — called scornful attention to the fact that 

C 



i8 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

during a crisis of awful distress in Mayo there had been but 
a subscription of 100/. from two persons out of a rental of 
10,400/. a year, and described the rents at the same time as 
exorbitant. In the same year Lord Melbourne, who had been 
Chief Secretary for Ireland, maintained that all the witnesses 
examined before the different select committees on the subject 
had united in the statement that the disturbances in Ireland 
were due to the relations between the landlords and tenants. 
In the same manner, bill after bill had been proposed. Mr. 
Brownlow's bill was brought in in 1829. It passed through 
the House of Commons ; it passed the second reading in the 
House of Lords ; it was referred to a select committee ; but 
they, on July 1, reported that at such an advanced period of 
the session it was impossible to proceed any further. 1 In the 
following year Mr. Henry Grattan called upon the Govern- 
ment to bring in a bill for the improvement of the waste 
lands. In the next year, 1831, Mr. Smith O'Brien introduced 
a bill for the relief of the aged, helpless, and infirm. In 1835 
Mr. Poulett Scrope asked in vain for a land bill ; in the same 
year Mr. Sharman Crawford brought in a bill. 2 In the following 
year Mr. Crawford got leave to introduce his bill again ; but 
it never got farther than that stage. In the following year a 
Mr. Lynch recurred to the old proposal of a bill for the 
reclamation of waste lands; but he also failed. In 1842 a 
small attempt was made to deal with the question of the 
waste lands by the Irish Arterial Drainage Act. In 1843 
came the Devon Commission ; this caused a pause in the 
efforts to amend the law. The Devon Commission recom- 
mended, as is known, legislation in the most emphatic manner ; 
but no legislation came. In 1845 Lord Stanley brought in a 
bill. The bill was read a second time, was referred to a select 

1 Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, by R. Barry O'Brien, 

P- 36-7. 

2 This bill put no restriction whatever on the power of eviction ; it simply 
asked that when a tenant was evicted he should receive compensation for those 
permanent improvements which he had made with the consent of his landlord. 
In the case of improvements made without the consent of the landlord, the chair- 
man of Quarter Sessions was to decide whether they presented a case for compen- 
sation. This was the basis of all the land bills which followed ; and Mr. Sharman 
Crawford's bill will often recur in these pages. 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 19 

committee, and was then abandoned. In the same session 
Mr. Crawford reintroduced his bill, but had to abandon it. 
In the next session, after some severe pressure, the Earl of 
Lincoln introduced a bill ; this was destroyed by the resig- 
nation of the Ministry. 

It will be seen from this rapid sketch that the conditions 
of the problem were intimately known ; that all parties — except 
a few of the Irish landlords themselves — were in favour of a 
change in the law ; that attempt after attempt had been made 
to create this change, and that attempt after attempt had 
failed. Meanwhile landlords and tenants were carrying on 
their warfare after their own lawless fashion. Allusion has 
been already made to the great clearances which followed the 
abolition of the forty-shilling freeholder and the amendment 
of the Sub-letting Act. In 1843 there were no less than 5,244 
ejectments, out of 14,816 defendants, from the Civil Bill 
Courts, and 1,784 ejectments from the Superior Courts, out 
of 16,503 defendants — making a total of 7,028 ejectments 
and 31,319 defendants. And in the five years from 1839 to 
1843 no less than 150,000 'tenants had been subjected to 
ejectment process.' l Unprotected by the law from robbery, 
and face to face with starvation, the tenants formed secret and 
murderous organisations, and assassination and eviction ac- 
companied each other in almost arithmetical proportion. As 
poverty increased, indebtedness, and indebtedness increased 
eviction, times of poverty and times of disturbance were syn- 
onymous terms. With disturbance the Legislature showed 
itself ready and eager to deal — when the remedy applied took 
the shape, not of remedial legislation, but of Coercion Acts. 
The year was the exception in which Ireland was living under 
the ordinary law. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in 
1800, in 1 80 1, in 1802, in 1803, in 1804, in 1805 5 it was 

1 This is how O'Connell puts it (Hansard, lxxxv. p. 520). By tenants, he 
probably means heads of families. Mr. Bernal Osborne, who spoke in the same 
debate subsequently to O'Connell, puts the figures in another way. ' There were,' 
he said, '70,982 civil bill ejectments between 1839 and 1843, exclusive of the 
number of individual occupiers served with process. Counting,' he added, 'five 
for a family, this would show a total of 354,910 persons evicted in this period ' 
{ib. p. 534). It will be seen presently what became of the persons evicted, and 
how they helped to bring about the Famine. 



20 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

suspended again from 1807 till 18 10 ; from 18 14 to 18 17 ; 
from 1822 to 1828 ; from 1829 to 1831 ; again from 1833 to 
1835. Side by side with the suspension of the Habeas 
Corpus Act there were other and special Coercion Acts ; 
frequently there were two Coercion Acts in the same year, 
sometimes in the same session : in the very first year of the 
Union Parliament no less than five exceptional laws were 
passed. These Coercion Acts were of a ferocious character : 
many of them abolished trial by jury ; some of them esta- 
blished martial law ; transportation, flogging, death, were the 
ordinary sentences. 

It is a singular and instructive commentary on the Act of 
Union, that the Union Parliament had not only passed five 
Coercion Acts on its first session, but that it had sat for but 
two months when it passed a Coercion Act severer than any 
passed even in the stress of the rebellion of 1798. This 
was one of the terrible code known as the Insurrection Acts. 
Under the Act of 1800, courts-martial had the right to try 
prisoners ; two-thirds of the officers could pronounce sentence, 
and the sentence might be the sentence of death. To en- 
courage these tribunals in doing their duty, the officers were 
instructed, in the words of the Act, 'to take the most vigorous 
and effective measures ' ; and they received still further en- 
couragement by being made absolutely irresponsible ; ' no 
act,' decreed the Legislature, ' done by these tribunals shall be 
questioned in a court of law.' In 18 17 a modified Insurrec- 
tion Act was passed, which in some respects was worse than 
the preceding Acts. A body of justices — that is, of landlords — 
were entitled to form a tribunal if they were presided over by 
a Serjeant-at-law or a Queen's Counsel, and this tribunal 
had the right to pass sentences varying from one year's 
imprisonment to seven years' transportation ; they were, like 
the courts-martial, irresponsible, for there was no appeal and 
no certiorari. These courts were employed in the trial of 
persons described as « idle and disorderly,' and the ' idle and 
disorderly ' were included in the following extensive category : 

(1) Anyone found out of his or her dwelling-house between two 
hours after sunset and sunrise, who could not prove to the satisfac- 
tion of the tribunal that he or she was upon his or her ' lawful occa- 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 21 

sions' — the mere fact of being out was sufficient authority to a 
policeman to arrest and detain till trial ; (2) persons taking unlawful 
oaths, or (3) having arms, or (4) found between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. in 
a public-house or unlicensed house in which spirituous liquors were 
sold and not being inmates or travellers ; (5) persons assembled 
'unlawfully and tumultuously ' ; (6) persons hawking 'seditious 
papers ' unless they disclose the persons from whom they received 
them. 

It would, of course.^be assumed by many readers, espe- 
cially English readers, that these statutes were severe only in 
wording or intention and not in practical operation. But 
there was not one of these Acts which was not carried 
not only to the full lengths authorised by the words and 
intentions of the Act, but to" a large extent farther. In order 
to make the dread provisions of the Insurrection Act just 
described applicable to a locality it had to be proclaimed, 
and this is an instance of how such a proclamation was 
brought about : 

' I am perfectly acquainted with that part of Kilkenny now 
under proclamation adjoining the Queen's County,' said 
Mr. John Dunn, a witness examined before the Lords' Com- 
mittee of T824. 

'Had there, been any disturbance,' asked one of their 
lordships, ' at the time the Act was put into execution ? ' ' Not 
in the barony of Innisfadden adjoining the Queen's County ; 
I am aware of none.' 

' Can you state,' goes on the examination, ' on what ground 
it was the Insurrection Act was applied for, so far as respects 
that barony and the circumstances attending it ? ' 'I under- 
stand that some few trees — some two or three — had been felled 
in the domain of Lady Ormonde, and I am not aware of any 
other transaction at all that would justify the application of 
such a measure.' ' 

Thus the felling of two or three trees was sufficient to 
expose everybody in this Kilkenny barony to the chance of 
being transported for seven years by a Queen's Counsel and 
a body of landlords to whom he was for any reason obnoxious 

1 Report Lords' Committee, 1824, p. 432. Quoted by O'Connell (Hansard, 
lxxxv. p. 503). 



22 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

if he only happened to stay beyond nine o'clock in a public- 
house. 

An Irish writer who has written an excellent article on 
the coercive legislation of Ireland in the 'Pall Mall Gazette 1 
of September 18, 1885, will doubtless appear far-fetched 
when he says of the Insurrection Act of 1822-25, that if 
' it had been in force in England during the Anti-Corn Law 
agitation, Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright might have been trans- 
ported for seven years by justices cfr landlords interested in 
maintaining the tax on food.' But the illustration is literally 
and strongly justified, for in 1814 the Insurrection Act was 
used by Sir Robert Peel to put down the Catholic Board and 
to prevent popular demonstrations ; that is to say, to suppress 
all agitation against the exclusion of the millions of Irish 
Catholics from any share in the government of their own 
country ; and that was an object as legitimate, legal, and con- 
stitutional as the repeal of the Corn Laws. 

There were several Acts for the purpose of putting down 
the disturbances which the terrible sufferings of the tenantry 
generated, and some of these Acts permitted the sentence of 
' whipping.' Here, again, it will be thought that the words 
were formal and minatory ; but, says O'Connell, who lived all 
through these Coercion laws, ' I have known instances where 
men have been nearly flogged to death.' ! 

Besides the Insurrection Acts, supplemented by suspensions 
of the Habeas Corpus, there were special Coercion Acts for 
every form of defence that the tenantry could devise. It has 
become the fashion of modern English statesmen to eulogise 
O'Connell ; when he was alive English statesmen met him 
at every point in his career by every agency of coercion that 
the Legislature could devise. It has been seen how the 
Insurrection Act was employed by Peel in 18 14 to put down 
the Catholic Board in which O'Connell had a part. Between 
1825 and 1836 no less than four Acts of Parliament were 
passed for the purpose of suppressing political organisations 
which he had founded, and as the organisations were under 
the control of O'Connell, it is needless to say that they were 
legal, constitutional, and peaceful in their methods. The 

1 Hansard, lxxxv. p. 503. 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 23 

Irish people, driven from open agitation, were then met by 
a disarming code lest they should seek their emancipation 
by force, and when, finally, they thought of secret organisa- 
tion, they were confronted by another code of laws with 
terrible penalties. Anybody who administered or aided in 
administering an oath for what were called ' seditious 
purposes ' might be transported for life by one of the 
tribunals consisting of landlords and a Queen's Counsel, 
and anybody who took the oath might be transported for 
seven years. 

Nor does this represent the complete case in the contrast 
between the action of the Legislature towards the landlord 
and the tenant. While every attempt had failed — no matter 
how moderate — to improve the condition of the tenant, the 
Legislature had passed law after law to increase the power of 
the landlord. Thus the 56 Geo. III. cap. 88 gave to the 
landlord a power of distraint which he never had enjoyed 
up to this period. Under this Act the landlord could distrain 
the growing crops of a tenant, could keep them till ripe, 
could save and sell them when ripe, and could charge the 
tenant with the accumulated expenses. This terrible Act 
was the starting-point of the great evictions which have been 
the chief causes of agrarian crime in Ireland. Two years 
afterwards came another Act to complete the evil work 
begun. The 58 Geo. III. cap. 39 established the power of 
civil bill ejectment. The previous Act had given the land- 
lord the means of ruining the tenant by the seizure of his 
crops ; this Act enabled the landlord to complete the ruin 
by turning the tenant off his holding. The 1 Geo. IV. 
cap. 41 extended still further the power of civil bill eject- 
ment ; the 1 Geo. IV. cap. 87 enabled the landlord to get 
security for costs from defendants in ejectments — that is to 
say, took away in a large proportion of cases any chance 
from the tenant of resisting the demand for the verdict of 
eviction ; the 1 & 2 Wm. IV. cap. 3 1 gave the land- 
lord the right of immediate execution in ejectment cases ; 
the 6 8z 7 Wm. IV. gave still further facilities for civil 
bill ejectments ; and thus the whole eviction code was 
made entirely complete, without chink, without flaw, without 



24 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

possibility of improvement 1 These, then, were the legisla- 
tive benefits by which the Irish people were taught the 
enormous gain of having their interests attended to by an 
Imperial and United Legislature. It should also be 
remarked that these Eviction Acts, and some of the worst 
of these Coercion Acts, were passed when the late Sir Robert 
Peel was Chief Secretary ; for, as we are told in Cates's 
' Dictionary of General Biography,' 'in 1 8 1 2 Peel was made 
Chief Secretary for Ireland — an office which he held with much 
advantage to the country till 1 8 1 8.' - The ' advantage ' to the 
country was the preparation of the famine. 

Let us now put the whole case in tabular form by way of 
making it more intelligible. 

For the Landlord. 

1800. Habeas Corpus suspended ; Coercion Act. 

1801. Habeas Corpus suspended ; two Coercion Acts. 

1802. Habeas Corpus suspended ; two Coercion Acts. 

1803. Habeas Corpus suspended ; two Acts. 

1804. Habeas Corpus suspended. 

1805. Habeas Corpus suspended ; one Coercion Act. 

1807. February 1, Coercion Act. 

,, Habeas Corpus suspended ; August 2, Coercion Act. 

1808. Habeas Corpus suspended. 

1809. Habeas Corpus suspended. 

1 81 4. Habeas Corpus suspended ; one Coercion Act. 

1 81 5. Habeas Corpus suspended ; Insurrection Act continued. 

1816. Habeas Corpus suspended; first Eviction Act; Insurrection Act 

continued. 

1817. Habeas Corpus suspended ; one Coercion Act ; second Eviction Act. 

1 8 18. Second Eviction Act. 

1820. Third Eviction Act ; same year, fourth Eviction Act. 

1822. Habeas Corpus suspended ; two Coercion Acts. 

1823 to 1828. Habeas Corpus suspended, and one Coercion Act in 1823. 

1829. Habeas Corpus suspended. 

1830. Habeas Corpus suspended ; Importation of Arms Act. 

1831. Whiteboy Act ; Stanley's Arms Act ; fifth Eviction Act. 

1832. Importation of Arms and Gunpowder Act. 

1833. Habeas Corpus suspended ; Suppression of Disturbance Act; Change 

of Venue Act. 

1834. Habeas Corpus suspended ; Suppression of Disturbance Amendment 

and Continuance Act ; Importation of Arms and Gunpowder Act. 

1835. Public Peace Act. 

1836. Another Arms Act ; sixth Eviction Act. 

1 O'Connell, in Hansard, lxxxv. pp. 522, 523. - P. 857 (Second edit.). 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 25 

1838. Another Arms Act. 

1839. Unlawful Oaths Act. 

1840. Another Arms Act. 

1841. Outrages Act ; another Arms Act. 

1843. Another Arms Act ; Act consolidating all previous Coercion Acts. 

1844. Unlawful Oaths Act. • 

For the Tenant. 

1829. Mr. Brownlow's Bill dropped in House of Lords. 

1830. Mr. Grattan's demand for an Improvement of Waste Lands Bill 

refused. 

1831. Mr. Smith O'Brien's Bill for the Relief of the Aged dropped. 

1835. Mr. Sharman Crawford's Bill dropped. 

1836. Mr. Sharman Crawford's Bill dropped. 

, , Mr. Lynch's Reclamation Bill dropped. 

1842. Irish Arterial Drainage Act passed. 

1845. Lord Stanley's Bill dropped. 

,, Mr. Sharman Crawford's Bill dropped. 

Nor had outraged nature neglected to give abundant warn- 
ing of the Nemesis she exacts. The famine of 1846-47 differs 
in degree only from the famines which had recurred at almost 
regular intervals in preceding periods* of Irish history. . Begin- 
ning with the last century, it was the chronic starvation 
among a considerable portion of the people that drew from 
Swift in 1729 the savage satire already alluded to; and in 
the year of the publication of ' The Modest Proposal ' there 
had been three years of dearth, and the people were reduced 
to the last extremity. In 1725, 1726, 1727, and in 1728 
the harvests were very bad ; and in 1739 there was a pro- 
longed frost that produced in the following years a famine 
which was one of the worst on record. Of that famine — 
the famine of 1740 -41 — we have many contemporaneous de- 
scriptions. According to one writer, four hundred thousand 
persons died. Bishop Berkeley has left behind touching 

1 This list I have compiled from O'Connell (Hansard, lxxxv. p. 5°5)> anc ^ 
from a pamphlet by Mr. I. S. Leadam, quoted by Mr. Healy in his pamphlet, 
Why there is a Land Question and an Irish Land League, pp. 68, 69, 1st edition. 
O'ConnelPs calculation is that there were seventeen Coercion Acts up to August, 
1837. There were nearly double that number— if not of Acts generally called 
Coercion, at least of an exceptional and restrictive character. Thus O'Connell 
enumerates three Coercion Acts in the first year after the Union : there were five. 
Nor does he include Arms Acts in his list ; though, of course, Arms Acts are 
Coercion Acts. Thus, in 1807, he mentions two Coercion Acts ; there were, 
besides, two Arms Acts. 



26 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

descriptions of the misery that came before his own eyes and 
smote his loving heart ; and another writer gives a pic- 
ture as terrible as any even in the history of famines. ' I 
have seen,' says this writer, ' the labourer endeavouring to 
work at his spade, but fainting for want of food, and forced to 
quit it. I have seen the aged father eating grass like a beast, 
and in the anguish of his soul wishing for his dissolution. I 
have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and 
none to take him in for fear of infection ; and I have seen 
the hungry infant sucking at the breast of the already expired 
parent' x 

In 1822 there was again a serious famine of considerable 
dimensions. Colonel Patterson, stationed at the time in 
Galway, tells how hundreds of half-starved wretches arrived 
daily from a distance of fifty miles, many of them so exhausted 
by want of food that means taken to restore them failed, 
owing to the weakness of their digestive organs (quoted from 
John Mitchel's 'History of Ireland,' p. 15). And certain 
official returns of the time state that in the month of June in 
Clare County alone, 99,630 persons subsisted on daily charity ; 
and in Cork, 122,000 (Alison's ' History of Europe,' quoted in 
John Mitchel's 'History of Ireland,' p. 154). Yet there was 
in 1821 a good grain crop, amounting to 1,822,816 quarters, 
and in 1822 to more than 1,000,000 quarters (Thorn's 'Direc- 
tory,' quoted by John Mitchel, p. 123). 2 

It was the peculiarity of the Act of Union and of the 
land legislation, that it was ultimately a curse as great to the 
landlord as to the tenant. In the pages which immediately 
follow there will be terrible stories of cruelty by the Irish 
landlords ; and these stories will often tempt the reader to ask 
whether the men who perpetrated such crimes could have had 

1 Lecky, History of England, ii. 218, 219. 

2 Cobbett, in his Register, remarked upon this strange phenomenon of abundant 
food and widespread starvation. 'Money it seems,' he wrote, 'is wanted in 
Ireland. Now, people do not eat money. No, but the money will buy them 
something to eat. What ? The food is there, then. Pray observe this, and let 
the parties get out of the concern if they can. The food is there ; but those who 
have it in their possession will not give it without the money. And we know 
that the food is there : for since this famine has been declared in Parliament, 
thousands of quarters of corn have been imported every week from Ireland to 
England.' — Quoted in Mitchel's History of Ireland, p. 153. 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 27 

the same flesh and blood as himself. The landlords of Ireland 
were no less human beings than the Southern planters who 
upheld the slavery of the negro, or than the noblesse whose 
tyranny produced the horrors of the French Revolution. Like 
their serfs, they were the victims to some extent of circum- 
stances. Behind their action in the days of the famine, there 
stood at least a century of extravagance. In the last century 
the Irish squire never dreamt that the time would come when 
the native Parliament of Ireland would be destroyed ; and 
acted as if Ireland were to be always his chief home, and 
Dublin always the capital to which the Parliament of his 
country would bring the fashion and the society of Ireland. 
The result was that he spent more in proportion to his means 
on the construction of his house than probably his English 
brother. The aristocratic mansions in Dublin — which, if they 
be fortunate, are now occupied as public offices ; and if unfor- 
tunate, have sunk to the degradation of tenement houses — 
were finer in the days before the Union than most of the 
houses which were then occupied by the aristocracy that 
dwelt in London. 

Then came the Union ; the price for which a large num- 
ber of the Irish nobility betrayed the liberties of their country 
was a step in the peerage. Dublin ceased with the departure 
of the Irish Legislature to be the seat of Irish fashion ; the 
Irish peer suddenly found himself obliged to live in the richer 
and more expensive country, in the larger and more expensive 
metropolis ; and then began the creation of debt, alleviated 
occasionally by the Irishman's proverbial luck in the capture of 
a rich parti. When the famine came, a vast number of the Irish 
landlords were inextricably in debt ; the Encumbered Estates 
Act had not yet been passed ; and accordingly there was 
no means whatever of rescue. It often happened, therefore, 
that the nominal and the real owner were two different per- 
sons. The nominal owner was an O'Flaherty or a Blake ; 
the real owner was the Hebrew gentleman resident in London 
from whom the O'Flaherty or the Blake had borrowed as 
much, or more, than the estate could bear. The Irish landlord 
of the period — as to a very recent date — was insolent, tyran- 
nical, ignorant ; a spendthrift, a gambler, often a drunkard ; 



28 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

but he often stood to be shot at for deeds which were the 
natural sequence, not of his own follies and vices, but of the 
follies and vices of those who had gone before him. 

The future of the Ireland which all these causes were 
preparing was forecast in several of the official reports 
already alluded to, and above all in the Report of the Devon 
Commission. 

A few extracts from these reports will complete the picture 
of Ireland in the days before the famine. These extracts will 
be very few and very brief, but they are sufficient to justify 
the assertion already made, that the famine was inevitable 
without land reform ; and that its advent could only fail 
to be foreseen by invincibly ignorant Ministers and Parlia- 
ments. 

I have seen a great deal of the peasantry (said the well-known 
engineer Alexander Nimmo, whose name is perpetuated by a pier in 
the town of Galway, in his evidence before the Committee of 1824). 
I have sometimes slept in their cabins, and had frequent intercourse 
with them, especially in the south and west of Ireland. I conceive 
the peasantry in Ireland to be in the lowest possible state of exist- 
ence ; their cabins are in the most miserable condition, and their food 
is potatoes, with water, very often without anything else, frequently 
without salt, and I have frequently had occasion to meet persons who 
begged of me on their knees, for the love of God, to give them some 
promise of employment, that from the credit they might get the means 
of supporting themselves for a few months until I could employ 
them. 1 

Nothing can be worse than the condition of the lower classes of 
the labourers, and the farmers are not much better (said Mr. J. 
Driscoll before the 1824 Committee) ; they have nothing whatever, 
I think, but the potatoes and water ; they seldom have salt. 

The Committee before whom this and the like evidence 
was brought reported : 

That a very considerable proportion of the population, variously 
estimated at a fourth or a fifth of the whole, is considered to be out 
of employment ; that this, combined with the consequences of an 
altered system of managing land, is stated to produce misery and 

1 P. 226 of the Report. Quoted by O'Connell (Hansard, lxxxv. p. 507). 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 29 

suffering which no language can possibly describe, and which it is 
necessary to witness in order fully to estimate. 1 

The situation of the ejected tenantry, or of those who are obliged 
to give up their small holdings in order to promote the consolidation 
of farms, is necessarily most deplorable. Tt would be impossible for 
language to convey an idea of the state of distress to which the 
ejected tenantry have been reduced, or of the disease, misery, or 
even vice which they have propagated where they have settled ; 
so that not only they who have been ejected have been rendered 
miserable, but they have carried with them and propagated that 
misery. They have increased the stock of labour, they have rendered 
the habitations of those who have received them more crowded, they 
have given occasion to the dissemination of disease, they have been 
obliged to resort to theft and all manner of vice and iniquity to 
procure subsistence ; but what is perhaps the most painful of all, a 
vast number of them have perished of want. 2 

The Poor Law Inquiry of 1835 reported that 2,235,000 
persons were out of work and in distress for thirty weeks in 
the year. 3 

Finally, the Devon Commission reported that it ' would be 
impossible to describe adequately the sufferings and priva- 
tions which the cottiers and labourers and their families in 
most parts of the country endure,' ' their cabins are seldom a 
protection against the weather,' ' a bed or a blanket is a rare 
luxury,' 'in many districts their only food is the potato, 
their only beverage water.' 4 

The evidence which I have now quoted as to the Land 
question may be best summed up in the words of Mr. Mill : 
' Returning nothing,' he writes of the Irish landlords, ' to 
the soil, they consume its whole produce minus the potatoes 
strictly necessary to keep the inhabitants from dying of 
famine.' 5 

It was this state of relations between landlord and tenant 
that gave to the potato its fatal importance in the economy 

1 Pp. 380, 381 of the Report of 1824. Quoted by O'Connell (Hansard, lxxxv. 
p. 508). 

- Quoted by O'Connell, ib. Report of Select Committee of 1S50, p. 8. 
Quoted by O'Connell, ib. pp. 508, 509. 

3 Quoted by Mr. Labouchere, Annual Register, 1847, p. 9. 

4 Quoted by O'Connell (Hansard, lxxxv. p. 509). 

5 Quoted in Healy, Why there is a Land Question, &c. p. 55. 



30 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of Irish life. The compromise between the two sides was that 
all the wheat and oats which were grown on the land should 
go to the payment of the rent ; and also so much of the 
potato crop as was not required to keep the tenant and his 
family from absolute starvation. The potato was found to 
be particularly well suited for the position of the tenant. It 
produced a larger amount per acre than any other crop ; it 
suited the soil and the climate ; it supplied a vegetable which, 
alone among vegetables, supported life without anything else. 
The potato meant abundant food or starvation, life or whole- 
sale death. It was the thin partition between famine and 
the millions of the Irish people. 

The plant that had so dread a responsibility had its bad 
qualities as well as its good ; it was fickle, perishable, liable 
to wholesale destruction, and more than once already had 
given proof of its terrible uncertainty. It will be seen by-and- 
by that the readiness of the potato to fail played a very 
important part, and, indeed, was the main factor in Irish 
life, not merely in the epoch with which we are now dealing, 
but in a period a great deal nearer to our own time. 

There was, however, no anticipation of disaster in 1845. 
The fields everywhere waved green and flowery, and there 
was the promise of an abundant harvest. There had been 
whispers of the appearance of disease ; but it was in countries 
that in those days appeared remote— in Belgium or Germany, 
in Canada or the Western States of America. It was not 
until the autumn of 1845 that it made its appearance for the 
first time in the United Kingdom. It was first detected in 
the Isle of Wight, and in the first week of September the 
greater number of the potatoes in the London market were 
found to be unfit for human food. In Ireland the autumnal 
weather was suggestive of some calamity. For weeks the 
air was electrical and disturbed : there was much lightning, 
unaccompanied by thunder. At last traces of the disease 
began to be discovered. A dark spot — such as would 
come from a drop of acid — was found in the green leaves ; 
the disease then spread rapidly, and in time there was 
nothing in many of the potato-fields but bleached and 
withered leaves emitting a putrid stench. 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 



3? 



The disease first appeared on the coast of Wexford, and 
before many weeks were over reports of an alarming cha- 
racter began to come from the interior. It was still a hopeful 
sign that a field of potatoes remained sound long after all the 
surrounding fields had been touched by the blight. The 
plague, however, was stealthy and swift, and a crop that was 
sound one day the next was rotten. As time passed on, the 
disaster spread ; potatoes, healthy when they were dug and 
pitted, were found utterly decayed when the pit was opened. 
All kinds of remedies were proposed by scientific men — 
ventilation, new plans of pitting and of packing, the separa- 
tion of the sound and unsound parts of the potato. All 
failed ; the blight, like the locust, was victor over all obstacles, 
omnipotent over all opposing forces. 

O'Connell and the public bodies of the country called the 
attention of the Government to the impending calamity. 
The Royal Agricultural Society — an association of land- 
lords — declared that a great portion of the potato crop 
was seriously affected. The Dublin Corporation called a 
public meeting under the presidency of the Lord Mayor, 
which O'Connell attended. He there drew attention to one 
of the facts which excited the most attention, and, afterwards, 
the fiercest anger of the time. This was, that while whole- 
sale starvation was impending over the nation, every port was 
carrying out its wheat and oats to other lands. Side by side 
with the fields of blighted potatoes in 1845, were fields 
of abundant oats. In one week — according to a quotation 
from the ' Mark Lane Express ' in O'Connell's speech — no 
less than 16,000 quarters of oats were exported from Ire- 
land to London. O'Connell joined in the proposal that the 
export of provisions to foreign countries should be imme- 
diately prohibited, and that at the same time the Corn Laws 
should be suspended, and the Irish ports opened to receive 
provisions from all countries. 

Here it is well to pause for a moment on this point. In 
favour of the proposal of closing the ports, O'Connell was 
able to adduce the example of Belgium, of Holland, of Russia, 
and of Turkey under analogous circumstances. Testimony is 
as unanimous and proof as clear as to the abundance of the 



32 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

grain crop as they are to the failure of the potato crop. 
' Everyone,' said Lord John Russell, in a letter he wrote to 
the Duke of Leinster in 1847, 'who travels through Ireland 
observes the large stacks of corn which are the produce of 
the late harvest' ' This corn was scattered far and wide. 
John Mitchel quotes the case of the captain who saw a vessel 
laden with Irish corn at the port of Rio in South America. 
On this point, more will be said by-and-by. 

The complaint of the Irish writers is that this wholesale 
exportation was not arrested, and on this they founded charges 
against the Ministers of the period, some grotesque, but some 
most true. It is grotesque to charge it as a crime against the 
English people that they ate the food which was supplied to 
them from Ireland : they obtained the right to eat the food 
by having paid for it. But the charge is just that it was the 
land legislation which the British Parliament had passed 
and maintained that rendered necessary the export of these 
vast provisions amidst all the stress and horrors of famine. 
There was scarcely a single head of all these cattle, there was 
scarcely a sheaf of all this corn, the price of which did not go 
to pay the landlord over whose exorbitance and caprice the 
Legislature had again and again refused to place any legisla- 
tive restraint. The Irish land system necessitated the export of 
food from a starving nation. The English Parliament was the 
parent of this land system ; the English Parliament was then 
responsible for the starvation which this exportation involved. 

The appeals which O'Connell, the Dublin Corporation, and 
other bodies in Ireland addressed to the Government, grew in 
intensity and urgency as the crisis advanced, and as the re- 
ports began to reach Dublin of numerous cases of starvation 
throughout the country. These appeals met with dilatory 
answers. The Government were noting all that took place ; 
then they were inquiring ; finally they had appointed a scien- 
tific commission to investigate the facts of the case ; and so 
on. Meantime the destroying angel was advancing with a 
certain and swift wing over the doomed country. 

It was one of the necessary consequences of the legislative 

1 Quoted in History of the Irish Famine, by Rev. J. O'Rourke, p. 248. 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 



33 



union that Ireland was inextricably involved in the struggles 
of English parties. And at this moment England was in the 
very agony of one of her greatest party struggles. The advent 
of the Irish famine was the last event that broke down Peel's 
faith in protection. When these warnings of impending dis- 
aster and these urgent prayers for relief came from Ireland, 
Peel was in the unfortunate position of being convinced of the 
danger, and at the same time impotent as to the remedies. He 
was at that moment in the midst of his attempts to carry over 
his colleagues to free trade ; and so his hands were tied. 
He did propose that the ports should be opened by Order 
in Council, but to this proposal he could not get some of his 
colleagues to agree. Then there came a Ministerial crisis : Peel 
resigned ; Lord John Russell was unable to form an Admin- 
istration ; and Peel again resumed office. The result of these 
various occurrences was that the ports were not opened and 
that Parliament was not summoned ; and thus three months — 
every single minute of which involved wholesale life or death — 
were allowed to pass without any effective remedy. 

Assuredly under such circumstances, O'Connell and the 
other leaders of the National party were justified in drawing 
a contrast between this deadly delay and the promptitude that 
a native Legislature would have shown. ' If,' he exclaimed at 
the Repeal Association, ' they ask me what are my proposi- 
tions for relief of the distress, I answer, first, Tenant-right. I 
would propose a law giving to every man his own. I would 
give the landlord his land, and a fair rent for it ; but I would 
give the tenant compensation for every shilling he might have 
laid out on the land in permanent improvements. And what 
next do I propose ? Repeal of the Union.' ! 

And then he went on with still greater force : ' If we had 
a domestic Parliament, would not the ports be thrown open — 
would not the abundant crops with which Heaven has blessed 
her be kept for the people of Ireland — and would not the Irish 
Parliament be more active even than the Belgian Parliament 
to provide for the people food and employment ? ' 2 

But Ireland had not won her Legislature ; and she had 
accordingly to wait patiently until January 22, when it suited 

1 History of Ireland, by John Mitchel, ii. 205. 2 lb. 

D 



34 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the English Premier to call Parliament together. The mys- 
terious replies of the Ministers — the perfect paralysis of 
independent effort which these suggestions had caused in 
Ireland — all tended to turn the eyes of the Irish people with 
feverish longing and expectation to this event. The opening 
hours of the session were sufficient to damp all these hopes. 
On means of affording relief the Queen's Speech was vague ; 
but on the question of Coercion it spoke in terms of unmis- 
takable plainness. ' I have observed,' said that document, 
'with deep regret, the very frequent instances in which the 
crime of deliberate assassination has been of late committed 
in Ireland. It will be your duty to consider whether any 
measures can be devised calculated to give increased protection 
to life and to bring to justice the perpetrators of so dreadful 
a crime.' I will deal with the justification for the new Coercion 
Bill when I come to describe the memorable struggle that took 
place on the Ministerial measure. Meantime, let it suffice to 
say that the characteristic contrast between the tender solici- 
tude of the Government for the landlords, and its half-hearted 
regard for the tenants — at the moment when of the tenants 
a thousand had died through eviction and hunger for every one 
of the landlords who had met death through assassination- 
roused the bitterest resentment in Ireland. ' The only notice,' 
exclaimed the ' Nation,' ' vouchsafed to this country is a hint 
that more gaols, more transportation, and more gibbets might 
be useful to us. Or, possibly, we wrong the minister ; perhaps 
when her Majesty says that " protection must be afforded to 
life," she means that the people are not to be allowed to die 
of hunger during the ensuing summer — or that the lives of 
tenants are to be protected against the extermination of 
clearing landlords — and that so " deliberate assassination " 
may become less frequent ; — God knows what she means — the 
use of Royal language is to conceal ideas.' 

The measures proposed by the Government for dealing 
with the distress were, first, the importation of corn on a 
lowered duty through the repeal of the Corn Laws ; and, 
secondly, the advance of two sums of 50,000/., one to the 
landlords for the drainage of their lands, and the other for public 
works. The ridiculous disproportion of these sums to the 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 35 

magnitude of the calamity was proved before very long ; 
but to all representations the Government replied in the 
worst and haughtiest spirit of official optimism. ' Instruc- 
tions have been given,' said Sir James Graham, ' on the 
responsibility of the Government to meet any emergency.' l 
Only one good measure was covered by the generous self- 
complacency of this round assertion. Under a Treasury 
minute of December 19, 1845, the Ministry had instructed 
Messrs. Baring and Co. to purchase 100,600/. worth of Indian 
corn. This they introduced secretly into Ireland, and its 
distribution proved most timely. 

Still the Irish members pressed for more definite assur- 
ances and larger proposals. But their suggestions and Peel's 
beneficent intentions were frustrated by the fatal entangle- 
ment of Irish sorrows in the personal ambitions and the 
partisan warfare of St. Stephen's. Peel had put forward the 
Irish famine as the main reason for his change of opinion on 
the Corn Laws ; and the Irish famine became one of the 
great debatable topics between the adherents of free trade 
and of protection. All the protectionist party in Parliament, 
all the organs of the landlords in Ireland, united in the state- 
ment that the reports of distress were unreal and exaggerated. 
1 The potato crop of this year,' wrote the ' Evening Mail ' of 
November 3, 1845, ' far exceeded an average one ' ; ' the corn 
of all kinds is so far abundant' — which, indeed, was quite 
true — ' the apprehensions of a famine are unfounded, and 
are merely made the pretence for withholding the payment 
of rent.' Some days after it repeated, ' there was a sufficiency, 
an abundance of sound potatoes in the country for the wants 
of the people.' 'The potato famine in Ireland,' exclaimed 
Lord George Bentinck, ' was a gross delusion, a more gross 
delusion had never been practised upon any country by any 
Government.' 2 ' The cry of famine was a mere pretence for 
a party object' 3 ' Famine in Ireland,' said Lord Stanley, was 
' a vision — a baseless vision.' 4 

The second great obstacle to the proper consideration of 
measures to meet the distress was the Coercion Bill. It was 

1 Mitchel, ii. ^05. 2 Quoted by O'Rourke, p. 104. 

3 Annual Register, 1846, pj 68. J lb. p. 80. 

D 2 



36 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

quite true that there had been several atrocious murders in 
Ireland ; but the provocation to outrage had been terrible. 
A passion — that looked something like an epidemic of homi- 
cidal mania — had seized many of the landlords for wholesale 
clearances at the very moment when the people were con- 
fronted with universal hunger. One of the very worst of 
these cases had taken place within a few days of the discus- 
sion on the Coercion Bill. A Mr. and Mrs. Gerard had 
turned out in one morning the entire population of the village 
of Ballinglass, in the county of Galway — 270 persons in 
number. Neither the old, the young, nor the dying had been 
spared ; and even after the eviction the tenants had been 
pursued with a frenzied hate. The roofs had been taken off 
their sixty houses ; and when the villagers took refuge under 
the skeleton walls, they were driven thence, and the walls were 
rooted from their foundations. Then they took shelter in the 
ditches, where they slept for two nights huddled together 
before fires — some of them old men eighty years of age, 
others women with children upon their breasts. They were 
forced from the ditches as from their hearths. The fires were 
quenched, and the outcasts were driven to wheresoever they 
might find a home or a grave. 

The proposals of the Coercion Bill of the Government 
were certainly startling. Under the bill the Lord-Lieutenant 
could proclaim any district, and could order every person 
within it ' to be and to remain ' within his own house from 
one hour before sunset to one hour before sunrise. No 
person could with safety visit a public-house, or a tea- or 
coffee-shop, or the house of a friend. A justice of the peace 
had the power to search for and drag out all such persons. 
The penalty was as terrible as the offence. Any person 
outside his own house, whether wandering on the highway or 
inside another house, was liable to be transported beycnd the 
seas for seven years. ' From four or five o'clock,' said Earl 
Grey, criticising the bill in the House of Lords, 1 'in the after- 
noon, till past eight on the following morning, during the 
month of December, no inhabitant of a proclaimed district 
in Ireland was to be allowed to set his foot outside the door 

1 Hansard, lxxxiv. p. 697. 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE $7 

of his cabin without rendering himself liable to this severe 
punishment. He might not even venture from home during 
that time to visit a friend, or to enjoy at any place a few 
hours of harmless recreation. Nay, he dared not even go to 
his work in the morning, or return from his work in the 
evening, so as to gain the advantage of the hours of daylight, 
without rendering himself liable to arrest at the will of a 
police constable, and to be kept in confinement, in default of 
proving what no man could prove — that he was out with 
innocent intentions.' 

Such a bill, ferocious at any time, was still more ferocious 
in the circumstances of Ireland at that moment. The man 
found outside a house between sunset and sunrise was liable 
to transportation for seven years ; and in this year the roads 
of all Ireland were crowded with wanderers, houseless, home- 
less, starving, and dying. Then the bill enabled the Lord- 
Lieutenant to inflict taxation on the proclaimed district for 
additional police, for additional magistrates, for compensation 
to the relations of murdered or injured persons ; and it was 
especially enacted that the taxation could be levied by 
distress, and levied on the occupiers only. The landlords, 
who, through absenteeism, or rack-renting, or the- clearances, 
were the direct authors and instigators of the despair that led 
to the crimes, were especially exempted from all taxation. 1 
Every tenant was liable ; and so resolute were the Govern- 
ment to inflict the tax, that the merciful exemptions by the 
Poor Law were abrogated. Under the Poor Law all persons 
in houses under 4/. valuation were free from the rates ; under 
the Coercion Bill the occupier of any house, whether above 
4/. or under 4/., was liable to the tax. And this at the 

1 Earl Grey : ' It was not just to exempt the landlords ; though they were 
not the cause of these outrages and evils, Ireland never would have got into its 
present state, the existing state of society there would never have been such as it 
was, if the landlords, as a body, had done their duty to the population under 
them; . . . he believed that of late years an improvement had taken place in the 
conduct of the landlords of Ireland towards their tenantry ; but if they looked to 
the past history of that land, the awful state of things now existing would be seen 
to be a direct consequence of the dereliction of their duty by the upper classes of 
that country, which was an historical fact known not only to England but to all 
Europe.' — Hansard, lxxxiv. pp. 694, 695, 



38 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

moment when the inhabitants of the greater number of the 
houses in Ireland had not one meal of potatoes a day ! 

But cruel as was such a bill at such a time, it would have 
been passed "with a light heart, and by huge majorities from 
all English parties, if the exigencies of English party warfare 
had not at this moment produced a curious and a not very 
moral alliance between the English Whigs, the English pro- 
tectionists, and the O'Connellites. The English Whigs were 
anxious to return to office ; the protectionists raged with the 
desire to be avenged on Peel for the abandonment of protec- 
tion ; and the two parties saw in a combination against this 
bill an opportunity of attaining their different ends. There 
were some slight obstacles, it was true, in the way. Lord 
John Russell had voted for the first reading of the bill, and 
Lord George Bentinck, in response to some overtures to use 
it against the ministers, had responded with fierce indigna- 
tion and a vehement defence of the measure. But Lord 
John Russell had a counsellor in his own ambition, and Lord 
George Bentinck as sinister an adviser in Mr. Disraeli : with 
the result that each performed a volte-face as prompt as it 
was shameless. They both condescended, of course, to 
supply most excellent and strictly decorous reasons for their 
change of attitude. Lord John Russell announced the dis- 
covery — made with the suddenness, and, as will be seen 
by-and-by, lost again with the suddenness of a modern 
miracle — that coercion aggravated, instead of curing the evils 
of Ireland ; and Lord George Bentinck, declaring that the 
Government had displayed insincerity in postponing the bill 
so long, proceeded to prove his own sincerity by taking care 
that it should be postponed to the Greek Kalends. It was 
under conditions like this that an Irish Coercion Bill was 
defeated for the first, and up to the present, for the last, 
time in the whole history of the Imperial Parliament. 

On June 26, 1846, the second reading of the Coercion 
Bill was rejected by 292 votes to 217. On June 29 Sir 
Robert Peel announced his resignation. In the opinion of 
the majority of the Irishmen who survive from that period, 
the change of administration was dearly bought by Ireland, 
even by the defeat of a Coercion Bill. The steps that had 



THE COMING OF THE FAMINE 39 

been taken by Peel were certainly grossly insufficient ; but 
the disaster with which he had to deal was small in compari- 
son with that which confronted Lord John Russell ; and the 
opinion of posterity — at least of Irish posterity — is that, as a 
minister, Lord John Russell was vastly inferior to Peel, and, 
therefore, much less competent to deal with the terrible crisis 
which had now come upon Ireland. 

Amidst the throes of these great struggles, Ireland was 
entering upon a new and a still more terrible chapter in her 
tragic annals. The Famine of 1846 was coming! 



40 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



CHAPTER III. 

THE FAMINE. 

NOTHING brings the desperate position of the Irish tenant 
home with more terrible clearness to the mind than the fact 
that the awful warning of 1845 was, and had to be, unheeded. 
The potato was still cherished as the only friend, the one 
refuge, the single resource of the peasant. He stuck, then, 
to the plant — not with the tenacity of despair ; not with the 
obstinacy of incurable fatuity ; but because in his circum- 
stances the potato, and the potato alone, offered him hope. 

Strangely enough, it was in no spirit of apprehension that 
the tenantry set to work in the preparation of the potato crop 
of 1846. Contemporary testimony is unanimous in describing 
them as working at that period with an energy that was 
frantic, with a hopefulness that was tragic — with a determi- 
nation to risk all on the one cast that exhibited for once a 
nation carried in the maelstrom of the gambler's desperation. 
' Although,' writes Mr. A. M. Sullivan, 1 ' already feeling the 
pinch of sore distress, if not actual famine, they worked as if 
for dear life ; they begged and borrowed on any terms the 
means whereby to crop the land once more. The pawn- 
offices were choked with the humble finery that had shone at 
the village dance or christening feast ; the banks and local 
money-lenders were besieged with appeals for credit. Meals 
were stinted ; backs were bared.' 

The signs of the seasons were watched throughout the 
year with fierce anxiety. The spring was unpromising 
enough. Snow, hail, and sleet fell in March ; and in Belfast 
there was snow as late as the first week in April. But when 
the summer came, it made amends for all this. The weather 

1 New Ireland, p. 59 (Eighth edit.). 



THE FAMINE 41 

in June was of tropical heat ; vegetation sprang up with 
something of tropical rapidity ; and everybody anticipated a 
splendid harvest. Towards the end of June there was again 
a change for the worse. The weather broke ; in Limerick 
there was on the 19th a sudden downfall of copious rain ; 
then came thunder and lightning, and after that intense cold. 
So also in July, there was the alternation of tropical heat 
and thunderstorm, of parching dryness and excessive rain. 
St. Swithin's Day was looked forward to with great eager- 
ness. There was a continuous downpour of rain ; and on 
the following day a fearful thunderstorm burst over Dublin. 
Still the crop went on splendidly ; and all over the country 
once again wide fields of waving green and flowery stalks 
promised exuberant abundance of the staple product of 
Ireland. 

It was in the early days of August that the first symptoms 
of the coming disaster were seen. The calamity was heralded 
by a strange portent that was seen simultaneously in several 
parts of Ireland, and that at once suggested the ghastly 
truth to those who had carefully watched the signs of the 
previous year. A fog — which some describe as extremely 
white and others as yellow — was seen to rise from the 
ground ; the fog was dry and emitted a disagreeable odour. 
A Mr. Cooper saw it on the Ox Mountains in Sligo ; Justin 
McCarthy remembers to have seen it in Bantry Bay in 
county Cork. Mr. Cooper at once suspected the real truth, 
and caused inquiries to be made. The companion who was 
with Mr. McCarthy at the time at once exclaimed that the 
blight was coming. And they were right ; the fog of that 
night bore the blight within its accursed bosom. The work 
of destruction was as swift as it was universal. In a single 
night and throughout the whole country the entire crop 
was destroyed, almost to the last potato. ' On the 27th of 
last month ' (July), writes Father Mathew, ' I passed from 
Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all the 
luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the 3rd 
instant (August), I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of 
putrefying vegetation.' * 

1 The Census for Ireland for the Year 1851. Part V. 'Table of Deaths,' 
vol. i. p. 270. 



42 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The meaning of the dread calamity burst upon the people 
at once ; but the suffering was yet to come. In the mean- 
time, they gave way to the poignancy of their grief or to the 
apathy of their despair. ' In many places,' writes Father 
Mathew, ' the wretched people were seated on the fences of 
their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing 
bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless.' 1 ' Blank 
stolid dismay, a sort of stupor, fell upon the people,' writes 
Mr. A. M. Sullivan, 'contrasting remarkably with the fierce 
energy put forth a year before. It was no uncommon sight to 
see the cottier and his little family seated on the garden fence, 
gazing all day long in moody silence at the blighted plot that 
had been their last hope. Nothing could arouse them. You 
spoke ; they answered not. You tried to cheer them ; they 
shook their heads. I never saw so sudden and so terrible a 
transformation.' 2 

' Famine advances on us with giant strides,' 3 wrote 
Captain Wynne, one of the officials of the time, from Ennis in 
the autumn of 1S46; and his words were soon confirmed. 
Towards the end of August the calamity began to be 
universal and its symptoms everywhere to be seen. Some of 
the people rushed into the towns, others wandered listlessly 
along the high roads in the vague and vain hope that food 
would somehow or other come to their hands. They grasped 
at everything that promised sustenance ; they plucked turnips 
from the fields ; many were glad to live for weeks on a single 
meal of cabbage a day. 4 In some cases they feasted on the 
dead bodies of horses and asses 5 and dogs ; 6 and there is at 
least one horrible story of a mother eating the limbs of her 
dead child. 7 In many places dead bodies were discovered 
with grass in their mouths and in their stomachs and bowels. 8 
In Mayo, a man who had been observed searching for food on 
the seashore, was found dead on the roadside, after vainly 
attempting to prolong his wretched life by means of the half- 

1 The Census for Ireland for the Year 185 1. Part V. ' Table of Deaths,' 
vol. i. p. 270. 2 New Ireland, p. 59. 

3 O'Rourke, p. 366. 4 Census Commissioners, p. 273. 

5 O'Rourke, pp. 390, 391. 6 Census Commissioners, p. 243. 

» lb. p. 310. 8 lb. pp. 243, 283. 



THE FAMINE 43 

masticated turf and grass which remained unswallowed in his 
mouth. Nettle-tops, wild mustard, and watercress were 
sought after with desperate eagerness. The assuaging of 
hunger with seaweed too often meant the acceleration of 
death, but seaweed was greedily devoured, 1 so also were 
diseased cattle, 2 and there were inquests in many places on 
people who had died from eating diseased potatoes. 3 Another 
general effect of the famine was that the characteristic merri- 
ment of the peasantry totally disappeared. 4 People went 
about, not speaking even to beg, with ' a stupid despairing 
look ; ' 5 children looked ' like old men and women ; ' 6 and 
even the lower animals seemed to feel the surrounding despair ; 
'the few dogs,' says a visitor to Mayo, 'were poor and piteous, 
and had ceased to bark.' 7 Even the ties of kindred were 
rent asunder. Parents neglected their children, and in a 
few localities children turned out their aged parents. 8 But 
such cases were very rare, and in the most remote parts 
of the country. There are, on the other hand, numberless 
stories of parents willingly dying the slow death of starvation 
to save a small store of food for their children. 9 

The workhouse was then, as it is now, an object of dread 
and loathing. Within its walls were accustomed to take 
refuge the rustic victims of vice and the outcasts of the 
towns. Entrance into the workhouse then was regarded not 
merely as marking the advent of social ruin, but of moral 
degradation. Thus it came that fathers and mothers died 
themselves, and allowed their children to die along with 
them within their own hovels, rather than seek a refuge 
within those hated walls. 10 But the time came when hunger 
and disease swept away these prejudices, and the people 
craved admission to the once-dreaded bastilles. Here again, 
however, hope was cheated ; the accommodation in the work- 
houses was far below the requirements of the people. At 
Westport 3,000 persons sought relief in a single day, when the 

1 Census Commissioners, p. 272. 

8 lb. pp. 271, 277. 
6 lb. p. 273. 

9 lb. p. 242 ; O'Rourke, pp. 401, 402 

10 Census Commissioners, p. 92. 





2 lb. p. 243. 


lb. p. 242. 


5 lb. p. 283, 


lb. p. 284. 


8 lb. p. 242. 



44 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

workhouse, though built to accommodate 1,000 persons, was 
already ' crowded far beyond its capacity.' x It was this town 
that Mr. Forster described as showing ' a strange and fearful 
sight like what we read of in beleaguered cities : its streets 
crowded with gaunt wanderers sauntering to and fro with 
hopeless air and hunger-struck look.' 2 At Carrick-on-Shannon 
there were no applications in one day ; there were 30 vacan- 
cies. 3 Driven from the workhouses, they began to die on the 
roadside, or, alone in their despair, within their own cabins. 
Corpses lay strewn by the side of once-frequented roads, and 
at doors in the most crowded streets of the towns. ' During 
that period,' writes Mr. Tuke, ' roads in many places became 
as charnel-houses, and several car and coach drivers have 
assured me that they rarely drove anywhere without seeing 
dead bodies strewn along the roadside, and that in the dark 
they had even gone over them. A gentleman told me that 
in the neighbourhood of Clifden one inspector of roads had 
caused no less than 140 bodies to be buried which he found 
along the highway.' 4 ( In our district,' writes Mr. A. M. 
Sullivan, 5 ' it was a common occurrence to find on opening the 
front door in early morning, leaning against it, the corpse of 
some victim who in the night-time had rested in its shelter. 
We raised a public subscription, and employed two men 
with horse and cart to go around each day and gather up the 
dead.' 

The scenes that were revealed when some of the cabins 
were entered were even more horrible. When the inmates 
found that death was inevitable, they made no further 
struggle, sought the assistance neither of the Government nor 
of their neighbours ; and occasionally, as Mr. Tuke tells us, 
the last survivor of a whole family ' earthed up the door of his 
miserable cabin to prevent the ingress of pigs and dogs, and 
then laid himself down to die in this fearful family vault.' & 
Men entering the cabins found the dead and the dying side 
by side — lying on the same pallet of rotting straw, covered 
with the same rags. ' The only article,' says an eye-witness 

1 O'Rourke, p. 393. 2 Census Commissioners, p. 283. 

8 lb. p. 273. * O'Rourke, p. 384. 

5 New Ireland, p. 65. 6 O'Rourke, pp. 3S4, 385. 



THE FAMINE 45 

of a scene in Windmill Lane, Skibbereen, ' that covered the 
nakedness of the family, that screened them from the cold, 
was a piece of coarse padding stuff which lay extended alike 
over the bodies of the living and the corpses of the dead ; 
which served as the only defence of the dying and the 
winding-sheet of the dead.' 1 

■ The first remarkable sign,' writes Mr. A. M. Sullivan, ' of 
the havoc which death was making was the decline and the 
disappearance of funerals.' 2 The annals of the time are full 
of the instances of this sinister change in the habits of 
Christian lands. The bodies of those who had fallen on the 
road lay for days unburied. Husbands lay for a week in the 
same hovels with the bodies of their unburied wives and 
children. Often when there was a funeral it bore even 
ghastlier testimony to the terror of the time. ' In this town,' 
writes a special correspondent of the ' Cork Examiner ' from 
Skibbereen, 'have I witnessed to-day men, fathers, carry- 
ing perhaps their only child to its last home, its remains 
enclosed in a few deal boards patched together ; I have seen 
them, on this day, in three or four instances, carrying those 
coffins under their arms or upon their shoulders, without a 
single individual in attendance upon them ; without mourner 
or ceremony — without wailing or lamentation. The people 
in the street, the labourers congregated in the town, regarded 
the spectacle without surprise ; they looked on with indiffer- 
ence, because it was of hourly occurrence.' 3 A Catholic 
priest, who was a curate in county Galway during the famine 
tells a story of meeting a man with a cart drawn by an ass 
on which there were three coffins, containing the bodies of his 
wife and two children. When he reached the churchyard he 
was too weak to dig a grave, and was only able to put a little 
covering of clay on the coffins. The next day the priest 
found ravenous dogs making a horrid meal from the corpses. 4 
In another part of the country a woman with her own hands 
dug the grave of her dead son. 5 

Meantime, what had the Government been doing ? They 
had, to put it briefly, been aggravating nearly all the evils 

1 O'Rourke, p. 272. 2 New Ireland, p. 64. 

8 O'Rourke, pp. 272, 273. * lb. p. 379. 5 lb. p. 405. 



46 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

that were reaping so rich a harvest of suffering and death in 
Ireland. The measures which Sir Robert Peel had taken 
during the recess of 1845 and in 4he early portions of the 
session of 1846 have been already mentioned. As time went 
on he had taken other steps to meet the crisis. Donations 
to the amount of 100,000/. had been given from the Treasury 
in aid of subscriptions raised by charitable organisations. A 
still more important step was the setting on foot of works for 
the employment of the destitute. 

The initial blunder of Lord John Russell was suddenly to 
close the works which had been set on foot by Peel. At the 
time when this decree went forth there were no less, than 
97,900 persons employed on the relief works ; and the effect 
of adding this vast army of unemployed to the population 
whose condition has just been described, can easily be 
imagined. 

The speech in which he announced his own policy fol- 
lowed on August 17, 1846 ; and, well-intentioned as it doubt- 
less was, there was scarcely a sentence in it which did not do 
harm, not a proposal that did not work mischief. The first 
important statement was that the Government did not pro- 
pose to interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn 
and other kinds of grain might be brought into Ireland. The 
Government proposed ' to leave that trade as much at liberty 
as possible.' ' They would take care not to interfere with the 
regular operations of merchants for the supply to the country 
or with the retail trade.' ' Then he described the new legisla- 
tion which he proposed. Relief works were to be set on foot 
by the Board of Works when they had previously been pre- 
sented at presentment sessions. For these works the Govern- 
ment were to advance money at the rate of 3^ per cent, 
repayable in ten years. In the poorer districts the Govern- 
ment were to make grants to the extent of 50,000/. This bill, 
when it became law, was known as the ' Labour Rate Act.' 

The evil effects of this speech and this legislation were 
not long in showing themselves. The declarations with 
regard to non-intervention with trade were especially dis- 
astrous. The price of grain at once went up, and while the 

1 Hansard, lxxxviii. p. 776. 



THE FAMINE 47 

deficiency of food was thus enormously increased, speculators 
were driven to frenzy by the prospect of fabulous gains. 
Strange and almost incredible results followed. Wheat that 
had been exported by starving tenants was afterwards reim- 
ported from England to Ireland ; sometimes before it was 
finally sold, it had crossed the Irish Sea four times — delirious 
speculation offering new bids and rushing in insane eagerness 
from the Irish to the English and from the English to the 
Irish market in search of the daily increasing prices. Stories 
are still told in Ireland with grim satisfaction of the abject 
ruin that was the Nemesis to the greedy speculators in a 
nation's starvation. More than one who kept his corn obsti- 
nately in store while the people around him were dying by 
the thousand, when he at last opened the doors found, not 
his longed-for treasure-house, but an accumulation of rotten 
corn, which had to be emptied into the river. 'A client of 
mine,' writes the late Master Fitzgibbon, 1 ' in the winter of 
1846-47 became the owner of corn cargoes of such number and 
magnitude that if he had accepted the prices pressed upon 
him in April and May, 1 847, he would have realised a profit 
of 70,000/. He held for still higher offers, until the market 
turned in June, fell in July, and rapidly tumbled, as an abun- 
dant harvest became manifest. He still held, hoping for a 
recovery, and in the end of October he became a bankrupt' 

' The Government,' said Lord John Russell, ' did not pro- 
pose to interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn 
might be brought into Ireland.' What was the result of this? 
According to a report from Commissary John Hewetson, 
dated December 30, 1846, Indian corn which had been bought 
for 9/ or 10/. a ton was selling for 17/. 5^. in Cork ; was not 
to be had at any price in Limerick, but, in the shape of meal, 
was fetching from 18/. 10s. to 19/. a ton. 'These,' said he, 
' are really famine prices ; ' 2 and then he tells how in Cork 
alone one firm was reported to have cleared 40,000/., and 
another 80,000/., from corn speculations. The reason for the 
non-intervention with the supply of Indian corn was that the 
retail trade might not be interfered with ; and at this period 
retail shops were so few and far between for the sale of corn 

1 Ireland in 1868, p. 205. 2 O'Rourke, p. 171. 



48 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

that the labourer in the public works had sometimes to walk 
twenty or twenty-five miles in order to buy a single stone of 
meal. 1 

It will be seen, presently, how the inflated price of corn, 
and the difficulty of obtaining it at any price high or low, co- 
operated with some provisions of the Labour Rate Act to 
enormously increase the sum of suffering and the total of 
deaths. 

These were 'the days when free trade was a doctrine 
professed with all the exaggeration and misconception of a 
new faith. The reader need not fear that I am about to 
inflict upon him any of the senseless and utterly unmean- 
ing abuse of free trade and political economy with which 
ignorant or half-educated writers are in the habit' of vexing 
intelligent men. The free trade under which Lord John 
Russell and his subordinates justified their fatal errors in 
1846 and 1847 was not free trade, but ghastly travesties of 
the doctrine, and hideous misunderstandings of the teach- 
ings of sound political economy. It will be seen by-and-by 
that Lord John Russell and all his subordinates had them- 
selves to make this acknowledgment, and to announce a pali- 
node as shameful as any in Parliamentary history. But in 
the end of 1846 they were still unshaken in their crazy mis- 
understanding of the subject — and indeed lectured the starving 
Irish nation with the supremacy of superior beings and the 
remote calm of dwellers on Olympian heights. The offen- 
siveness of the attitude and the absurdity of the doctrines 
were a good deal intensified by the fact that, with character- 
istic tenderness for Irish feeling, the preachers selected to 
announce those doctrines were self-sufficient English civil 
seivants, or Scotchmen with more than the usual amount of 
the rancorous dogmatism characteristic of their race. 2 

1 O'Rourke, p. 172. 

2 As an instance : a deputation waited on Sir R. Routh, head of the 
Commissary Department, from Achill, representing the total destruction of the 
potatoes there, the absence of green crops, and asking for a supply of food from 
the Government stores, for which the inhabitants were ready to pay. The reply 
of Sir R. Routh was a peremptory refusal, coupled with the statement that 
'nothing was more esseniial to the welfare of a country than strict adherence to 
free trade.' ' Then he begged to assure the reverend gentleman— meaning one of 



THE FAMINE 49 

There was to be no interference with the ordinary opera- 
tions of trade. Thus it was decreed that the food which was 
in the food depots that had been established at various points 
in Ireland should not be sold at moderate prices — and, in fact, 
should not be sold at all until the autumn. The result was 
that people with money in their hands died vainly begging 
food from the Government stores. 1 

The Labour Rate Act was made even worse in operation 
by the rules of these same officials. First, the whole policy 
of the Act was to make the famine a Government business. 
It was Government that had the carrying out of all the works ; 
the Government had to be consulted about everything, to 
give their approval to everything. The result was that all 
independent initiative and effort were stifled ; local bodies in 
their paralysis were sent from one department of the circum- 
locution office to another ; then, in their despair and distrac- 
tion, did nothing. The rule of Red Tape was established 
with plenary powers and disastrous results. In April 1846, 
Messrs. Jones, Twistleton and Co. were able to report that they 
had sent to Ireland ' ten thousand books, besides fourteen tons 
of paper.' ' Over the whole island,' writes John Mitchel, ' for 
the next few months was a scene of confused and wasteful 
attempts at relief — bewildered barony sessions striving to 
understand the voluminous directions, schedules, and specifica- 
tions under which alone they could vote their own money to 
relieve the poor at their own doors : but generally making 
mistakes — for the unassisted human faculties never could com- 
prehend these ten thousand books and fourteen tons of paper ; 
insolent commissioners and inspectors and clerks snubbing 
them at every turn and ordering them to study the docu- 
ments ; efforts on the part of the proprietors to expend some 
of the rates at least on useful works — reclaiming land or the 
like — which efforts were always met with flat refusal and a 
lecture on political economy. . . . plenty of jobbing and 
peculation all this while.' 2 

With a view to prevent competition with private enter- 

the deputation — that if he had read carefully and studied Bourke, his illustrious 
countryman, he would agree with him (Sir R. Routh).' — O'Rourke, pp. 222,223 
1 O'Rourke, p. 226. 2 History of Ireland, ii. 215. 



50 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

prise, the money was all to be devoted to exclusively ' unpro- 
ductive works,' by which were excluded railways, reclamation, 
and the like. The positive and the negative results of this 
restriction were equally prejudicial. There were railways 
demanding extension ; millions of waste land demanding re- 
clamation ; miles of marsh ready to be drained ; — all such 
work was forbidden. The look-out was then for unproduc- 
tive work ; and unproductive work, in a sense a good deal 
more literal than the Government wanted, was discovered. 
The stories told of the kind of work done under these loans 
would be incredible if they were not so well attested — among 
other things by solid monuments that exist to this day. 
Roads were made leading to nowhere ; hills were dug away 
and then were filled up again ; and so utterly useless was 
this kind of labour that sometimes good roads were actually 
spoiled, and traffic was impeded for some time by these sup- 
posed improvements. Hardly any of the roads were ever 
finished. ' Miles of grass-grown earthworks,' writes Mr. A. M. 
Sullivan, 1 'throughout the country now mark their course 
and commemorate for posterity one of the gigantic blunders 
of the famine time.' ' While on the subject of mistakes,' said 
the Knight of Glin, a well-known landlord of the period, ' he 
might mention on the Glin Road some people are filling up 
the original cutting of a hill with the stuff they had taken 
out of it. That,' he added naively, ' is another slice of our 
450/.'— the sum lent to the Shanagolden Union for relief 
works.' 2 

Even this useless work — as has been seen — was not allowed 
to be done without the maddening preliminaries of vexatious 
and imbecile official delays. But this was not from the want 
of a sufficiently large staff. There were no less than 10,000 
officials ; and these appointments were given from the most 
corrupt motives. This example of corruption at the top had 
a good deal to do with the disastrous and universal spirit of 
corruption below. And the most heart-rending feature of it 
all was that all this machinery, all this vast army of officials, 
all these vast sums of money, not only did no good, but were 
productive of an increase instead of a diminution of the 

1 New Ire/and, p. 64. 2 "litchel, ii. 216. 



THE FAMINE 51 

miseries of the country. As to a large portion of the people, 
the relief — such as it was — came too late. ' The wretched 
people were by this time too wasted and emaciated to work. 
The endeavour to do so under an inclement winter sky only 
hastened death. They tottered at daybreak to the roll-call, 
vainly tried to wheel the barrow or ply the pick, but fainted 
away on the cutting, or lay down by the wayside to rise no 
more.' ' 

But officialism was not convinced, and insisted on making 
the Act still more cruel by the regulations under which it 
was to be worked. ' Those who choose to labour may earn 
good wages,' wrote Colonel Jones to Mr. Trevelyan 2 — the one 
the head of the Board of Works, the other the representative 
of the Treasury ; and in accordance with this superfine dictum 
of the official mind, it was decreed that the work done should 
be task-work. In other words, the feebler a man was, the 
less help he was entitled to receive ; the nearer to starvation, 
the more quickly he should be pushed by labour into the 
grave. Hapless wretches, often with wives and several chil- 
dren dying of hunger at home — sometimes with the wife or 
one of the children already a putrid corpse — crawled to their 
work in the morning, there drudged as best they could, and at 
the end of the day often had as their wage the sum of fivepence 
— sometimes it went as low as threepence. 3 To earn this sum 
too, it often happened that the starving man had to walk three, 
four, five, eight Irish miles to, and the same distance from, his 
work. Finally, owing to blunders, he was frequently unable 
even to get this pittance at the end of the week 01* fortnight : 
and then he returned to his cabin to die — unless, as often 
happened, he died on the wayside. 4 

Even when he was paid, the meal-shop was miles away — 
for the retail trade, with which the Government would not 
interfere, existed only in Government imagination ; and meal- 
shops were only to be found at long intervals. Or, if he 
reached the meal-shop, Government measures again had raised 
the price of meal beyond the reach of relief work wages ; 
and if he knocked at the doors of the Government depots, a 

1 New Ireland, p. 64. 3 lb. 206. 

2 O'Rourke, p. 209. 4 lb. p. 258. 



52 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

harsh Scotch voice replied that in the name of political eco- 
nomy he should die. 1 

Finally, the evil done by the Labour Rate Act was in 
attracting from the cultivation of their own fields nearly all 
the farmers of the country. The prospect of immediate wages 
proved more enticing than the uncertainty of a remote and 
fickle harvest ; and the universal peculation, combined with 
the absolute uselessness of the works done, spread a spirit of 
hideous demoralisation. The farmers flocked to them ' solely/ 
as Mr. Fitzgibbon puts it, ' because the public work was in 
fact no work, but a farcical excuse for getting a day's wages.' 2 
The labourers, having the example of a great public fraud 
before their eyes, are described by Mitchel as ' themselves 
defrauding their fraudulent employers — quitting agricultural 
pursuits and crowding the public works, where they pretended 
to be cutting down hills and filling up hollows, and with 
tongue in cheek received half wages for doing nothing.' 3 

The Conservative organs of the period, which were no 
friends of the national newspapers, joined them in the de- 
scriptions of the hideous demoralisation which these works 
were producing : and they foretold with a fatal accuracy the 
effects of it all on the following year. ' There is not a labourer 
employed in the county except on public works,' wrote the 
' Dublin Evening Mail,' ' and there is prospect of the lands 
remaining untilled and unsown for the next year.' ' The good 
intentions of the Government,' wrote the ' Cork Constitution,' 
' are frustrated by the worst regulations — regulations which, 
diverting rabour from its legitimate channels, left the fields 
without hands to prepare them for the harvest' 4 To sum up 
the case in reference to this effect of the Labour Rate Act — 
the means that were taken to meet the famine of 1846 proved 
the precursors and the preparers of the famine of 1 847. 

The records of the sufferings from hunger in that year 
are almost more revolting and terrible than those of 1846. 

Meantime another, and a bitter calamity was added to 
those from which the people were already suffering. Pesti- 
lence always hovers on the flank of famine, and combined 

1 O'Rourke, p. 225. 2 Ireland in 1868, p. 206. 

3 Histoiy, ii. p. 215. * lb. p. 216. 



THE FAMINE 55 

with wholesale starvation there were numerous other circum- 
stances that rendered a plague inevitable — the assemblage of 
such immense numbers of people at the public works and in 
the workhouses, the vast number of corpses that lay unburied, 
and finally the consumption of unaccustomed food. The 
plague which fell upon Ireland in 1846-47 was of a peculiarly 
virulent kind. It produced at once extreme prostration, and 
every one struck by it was subject to frequent relapses ; in 
Kinsale Union, out of 250 persons attacked, 240 relapsed. 1 

The name applied to it at the time sufficiently signified 
its origin. It was known as the 'road fever.' 2 Attacking as 
it did people already weakened by hunger, it was a scourge 
of merciless severity. Unlike famine, too, it struck alike at 
the rich and poor — the well-fed and the hungered. Famine 
killed one or two of a family ; the fever swept them all away. 
Food relieved hunger ; the fever was past all such surgery. 

Many of the people, worn out by famine, had not the 
physical or mental energy even to move from their cabins. 
The panic which the plague everywhere created intensified 
the miseries of those whom it attacked. The annals of the 
time are full of the kindly, but rude attempts of the poor to 
stand by each other. It was a common custom of the period 
to have food left at the doors or handed in on shovels or sticks 
to the people inside the cabins ; but very often the wretched 
inmates were entirely deserted. Lying beside each other, 
some living and some dead, their passage to the grave was un- 
cheered by one act of help, by one word of sympathy. Here 
is a brief, but complete, picture of this dread phase of the 
days of the plague : ' A terrible apathy hangs over the poor 
of Skibbereen ; starvation has destroyed every generous 
sympathy ; despair has made them hardened and insensible, 
and they sullenly await their doom with indifference and with- 
out fear. Death is in every hovel ; disease and famine, its 
dread precursors, have fastened on the young and the old, 
the strong and the feeble, the mother and the infant ; whole 
families lie together on the damp floor devoured by fever, 
without a human being to wet their burning lips or raise 

1 Census Commissioners, p. 304 2 lb. p 278. 



54 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

their languid heads ; the husband dies by the side of the 
wife, and she knows not that he is beyond the reach of earthly 
suffering ; the- same rag covers the festering remains of 
mortality and the skeleton forms of the living, who are un- 
conscious of the horrible contiguity ; rats devour the corpse, 
and there is no energy among the living to scare them from 
their horrid banquet ; fathers bury their children without 
a sigh, and cover them in shallow graves round which no 
weeping mother, no sympathising friends are grouped ; one 
scanty funeral is followed by another and another. Without 
food or fuel, bed or bedding, whole families are shut up 
in naked hovels, dropping one by one into the arms of 
death.' » 

The fever-stricken wretches who had energy enough to 
crawl from their own homes and seek a refuge, became the 
heralds of disease wherever they went, and often suffered 
tortures more prolonged and darker than those who had lain 
down and died by their own hearthstones. Many of them 
directed their steps to the towns. ' From the commencement 
of 1847,' writes Dr. Callanan, ' Fate opened her book in good 
earnest here, and the full tide of death flowed everywhere 
around us. During the first six months of that dark period, 
one-third of the daily population of our streets consisted of 
shadows and spectres, the impersonations of disease and 
famine, crowding in from the rural districts and stalking 
along to the general doom — the grave — which appeared to 
await them but at the distance of a few steps or a few short 
hours.' 2 

' In cases succeeding exhaustion from famine,' says 
another writer, ' the appearances were very peculiar — the 
fever assuming a low gastric type, indicated by a dry tongue, 
shrunk to half its size, and brown in the centre ; lips thin and 
bloodless, coated with sordes ; skin discoloured and sodden ; 
general appearance squalid in the extreme, and hunger- 
stricken. These symptoms, and a loathsome, putrid smell 
emanating from their persons, as if the decomposition of the 

1 Cork Examiner— quoted by Census Commissioners' ' Tables of Deaths,' 
vol. i. p. 272. 

2 Census Commissioners, p. 301. 



THE FAMINE 55 

v#al organs had anticipated death, rendered these unhappy 
cases too often hopeless. They used to creep about the city 
while their strength allowed, and then would sink exhausted 
in some shed or doorway, and often be found dead.' l 

The workhouses and the hospitals were besieged more than 
ever ; and death now raged with a terrible promptness and 
universality. There was the same difficulty as when starving 
thousands clamoured for admission and help in buildings in 
which only hundreds could be attended to ; and there are 
descriptions of scenes enacted outside the hospitals and work- 
houses so revolting as to be almost incredible. • Before ac- 
commodation for patients,' write the Census Commissioners, 
'approached anything like the necessity of the time, most 
mournful and piteous scenes were presented in the vicinity 
of fever hospitals and workhouses in Dublin, Cork, Waterford 
Galway, and other large towns. There, day after day, numbers 
of people, wasted by famine and consumed by fever, could be 
seen lying on the footpaths and roads waiting for the chance 
of admission ; and when they were fortunate enough to be 
received, their places were soon filled by other victims of 
suffering and disease ! ' 2 

' At the gate leading to the temporary fever hospital, 
erected near Kilmainham, were men, women, and children, 
lying along the pathway and in the gutter, awaiting their 
turn to be admitted. Some were stretched at full length, 
with their faces exposed to the full glare of the sun, their 
mouths open, and their black and parched tongues and 
encrusted teeth visible even from a distance. Some women 
had children at the breast who lay beside them in silence 
and apparent exhaustion — the fountain of their life being 
dried up ; whilst in the centre of the road stood a cart 
containing a whole family who had been smitten down to- 
gether by the terrible typhus, and had been brought there by 
the charity of a neighbour.' 3 

' Fever,' writes the ' Freeman's Journal,' ' has increased in 
Galway and Loughrea ; numbers may be seen lying in rags 
cr straw in the streets in the height of disease.' ' Alarming 
spread of fever in Dublin,' is the language of the same journal ; 

1 Census Commissioners, p. 302. 2 Id. 248. 3 lb p. 297. 



56 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

'crowds lying on the ground at Glasnevin and in Cork 
Street waiting for admission to the hospital.' l 

Outside the workhouses similar scenes took place. The 
case of Westport workhouse has been mentioned already, 
where as many as three thousand, suffering from hunger 
and fever, sought admission on the same day. ' Those 
who were not admitted — and they were, of course, the great 
majority — having no homes to return to, lay down and 
died in Westport and its suburbs.' 2 Mr. Egan was clerk of 
the union at the period, and in a conversation with Father 
O'Rourke, pointing to the wall opposite the workhouse gate, 
said : •' There is where they sat down never to rise again. I 
have seen there of a morning as many as eight corpses of 
those miserable beings who had died during the night. 

Father G (then in Westport) used to be anointing them 

as they lay exhausted along the walls and streets, dying of 
nunger and fever. ' 3 

Admission to the fever hospital, and, still more, to the 
workhouse, was but the postponement, and often the ac- 
celeration of death. Owing to the unexpected demands 
made upon their space, the officials of these institutions were 
utterly unable to adopt the primary and fundamental mea- 
sures for diminishing the epidemic. The crowding rendered it 
impossible to separate the sick and the healthy, sometimes 
to separate even the dead and the dying ; there were not 
beds for a tithe of the applicants : and thus the epidemic was 
spread and intensified, instead of being alleviated and di- 
minished. ' Inside the hospital enclosure' (the fever hospital 
at Kilmainham), says a writer already quoted, ' was a small 
open shed, in which were thirty-five human beings heaped 
indiscriminately on a little straw thrown on the ground. 
Several had been thus for three days, drenched by rain, &c. 
Some were unconscious, others dying ; two died during the 
night' 4 ' We visited the poorhouse at Glenties ' (county of 
Donegal), says Mr. Tuke in the 'Transactions of the Relief 
Committee of Friends,' ' which is in a dreadful state ; the people 
were, in fact, half starved, and only half clothed. They had 

' Census Commissioners, p. 297. 2 O'Rourke, p. 393. 

3 lb. * 4 Census Commissioners, p. 272. 



THE FAMINE 57 

not sufficient food in the house for the day's supply. Some 
were leaving the house, preferring to die in their own hovels 
rather than in the poorhouse. Their bedding consisted of 
dirty straw, in which they were laid in rows on the floor — 
even as many as six persons being crowded under one rug. 
The living and the dying were stretched side by side beneath 
the same miserable covering.' The general effect of all this 
is summed up thus pithily but completely in the report of 
the Poor Law Commissioners for 1846 : ' In the present state 
of things nearly every person admitted is a patient ; separa- 
tion of the sick, by reason of their number, becomes impos- 
sible ; disease spreads, and by rapid transition the workhouse 
is changed into one large hospital' ' 

The workhouses and the hospitals were not the only 
public institutions which were filled to overflowing. The 
same thing happened to the gaols. The prison came to be 
regarded as a refuge. Only smaller offences were at first 
committed ; and an epidemic of glass-breaking set in. But 
as times went on, and the pressure of distress became greater 
and the hope of ultimate salvation less, graver crimes became 
prevalent. Thus sheep-stealing grew to be quite a common 
offence ; and a prisoner's good fortune was supposed to. be 
complete if he were sentenced to the once dreaded and 
loathed punishment of transportation beyond the seas. The 
Irishman was made happy by the fate which took him to any 
land — provided only it was not his own. And Botany Bay 
was transformed in peasant imagination from the Inferno of 
the hopeless to the Paradise of sufficient food and a great 
future. 

But here again the refugees were confronted by the same 
horrors which awaited those who obtained admission to the 
workhouses and the fever hospitals. The prisons, without a 
tithe of the accommodation necessary for the inmates, became 
nests of disease ; and often the offender who hoped for the 
luck of transportation beyond the seas, found that the sen- 
tence of even a week's imprisonment proved a sentence of 
death. In 1846, the Inspectors-General of Prisons reported 
that the increase of committals in that year over 1845 some- 

1 Census Commissioners, p. 272. 



58 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

times amounted to one hundred per cent., and then stated 
that ' in a very great number of instances small crimes have 
been committed for the purpose of obtaining that support in 
prison which could not be procured elsewhere.' ' In 1847 they 
write : ' The terrible catastrophe which has disorganised the 
whole framework of society in Ireland fell with its full force 
on establishments under our charge. Disease and death 
increased to a degree that could never be contemplated by 
those acquainted with the usual orderly and healthy state of 
our gaols. The crowding together of 12,883 prisoners in gaols 
only calculated to contain 5,655, increased the deaths in the 
Irish prisons, in a single year, from 131 to 1,3 1 5.' 2 'In 
March,' writes Dr. Browne of the Castlebar gaol, ' our county 
gaol was crowded to more than double its capability, those 
committed being in a state of nudity, filth, and starvation.' 
Typhus broke out, and ' by the. end of April we were in a 
state of actual pestilence. Every hospital servant was at- 
tacked, and from our wretched overcrowded state the mor- 
tality was fearful — fully forty per cent. ; . , not a few of those 
committed were inmates of the fever wards a few hours after 
committal.' 3 

The years 1848 and 1849 present the same features. 
The increase of committals in 1848 over those of 1847 was 
no less than 34,i05. 4 

11 Census Commissioners, p. 304. s Id. pp. 304, 305. 

3 lb. pp. 300, 301. 

4 This is the comment of the Inspectors-General : — 'The calamitous visitation 
of the last few years, operating with no exclusive pressure — affecting the most 
opulent and the humblest poor alike— suspending employment, and staying the 
hand of charity — has sorely tried the integrity of our people. Larcenies have 
multiplied, because, ordinarily, men will steal food rather than die ; but to such 
as have made criminal compliance with necessity must be added vast numbers 
who, without means of earning subsistence, and unable to procure charitable aid, 
notoriously appropriated articles of trifling value that they might obtain the shelter 
of a prison under the guise of a commitment for a criminal offence. — Report of 
Inspectors-General of Prisons: Census Commissioners' 'Tables of Deaths,' 
p. 311. 

Here is a grim description of a prison of the period : it is written of Gahvay 
Gaol under date February 8, 1848 : — 'It presented the appearance not only of a 
prison, but that of a poorhouse and an infirmary. The prisoners were, in general, 
the most wretched class of human beings I ever beheld — badly clothed, and 
emaciated from the destitution to which they had been exposed, and from which 



THE FAMINE 59 

In 1849 there was again an increase of committals, to the 
extent of 3,467 on the previous year, and the Inspectors- 
General comment on this significant phenomenon, ' The evil 
thus produced is so enormous as to threaten the total de- 
moralisation of the lower orders, showing itself in the 
abolition of all distinction between right and wrong, and ger- 
minating a habit of committing crimes either for the sake of 
obtaining board and lodging in a gaol, or else for the remoter 
advantages of superior diet in the convict prisons, and the 
ultimate benefit of gratuitous emigration.' ' 

Thus the plague worked — within the cabins, on the roads, 
in workhouses, in hospitals, in gaols. Of the numberless proofs 
of its dread activity let the following specimens suffice : — 

Fever first demands attention. In one week 50 persons 
died in the workhouse at Castlerea. 2 In Carrick-on-Shannon 
there were, on April 16, 1847, 300 cases of fever. The 
weekly deaths were 50. 3 In one hospital in Dublin, Cork 
Street, 12,000 cases applied in ten months. 4 At Cork 
there were 174 deaths in seven days, or more than a death 
-every hour. 5 In one day in the beginning of February, 1847, 
there were 44 corpses 4n the workhouse in the same city, 
and, on the 10th of the same month in that year, 100 
bodies were conveyed for interment to a single graveyard 
outside the town. 6 In the week ending April 3, 1847, of 
the entire number of inmates in the Irish workhouses — viz. 
104,485 — 26,000 were sick, and of these 9,000 were fever 
patients. 7 During that week the number of deaths was 2,706, 
and the average of deaths in each week during the month 
was 25 per thousand of the entire inmates. 8 

many sought refuge in the gaol by asking alms and by the commission of petty 
crimes. Fever and dysentery are prevalent amongst the prisoners, and some die 
before they can be brought to the hospital, which is filled with the sick and dying. 
Clad in miserable rags, crowded together during the day and heaped together 
during the night, contagious disease has taken loot within the prison walls ; and 
an extensive mortality was apprehended as the speedy and inevitable result.' It 
is added that of the 888 inmates, more than 120 were suffering from fever and 
dysentery. — lb. 

1 Report of Inspectors-General of Prisons : Census Commissioners' ' Tables 
of Deaths,' p. 322. 2 lb. p. 27S. 

3 lb. p. 296. 4 lb. p. 298. 5 lb. p. 284. 

6 lb. p. 282. 7 lb. p. 304. 8 lb. 



60 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Fifty-four, out of one hundred workhouse officials who 
were attacked with the fever, died between January i and 
April 2, 1847. 1 Of the entire medical staff employed in the 
different institutions of the country, one-fifteenth died in the 
same year. 2 ' Taking the recorded deaths from fever alone,' 
write the Census Commissioners, 3 ' between the beginning of 
1846 and the end of 1849, and assuming the mortality at one 
in ten, which is the very lowest calculation, and far below 
what we believe to have occurred, above a million and a half, 
or I )S9S>°4° persons — being one in 4*11 of the population in 
185 1 — must have suffered from fever during that period.' 
' But,' continued the writers, ' no pen has recorded the numbers 
of the forlorn and starving who perished by the wayside or in 
the ditches, or of the mournful groups, sometimes of whole 
families, who lay down and died one after another upon the 
floor of their miserable cabin, and so remained uncoffmed and 
unburied till chance unveiled the appalling scene.' 4 

The deaths from fever in 1845 were 7,249. From that 
figure they rose to 17,145 in 1846; to 57,095 in 1847. In 
1848 they were 45,948 ; in 1849 they numbered 39,316; in 
1850 they fell to 23,545. Finally, the total deaths between 
1841 and 1 85 1 from fever were 222,029. But, allowing for 
' deficient returns, 250,000' — a quarter of a million of people — 
' perished from fever alone.' b 

The famine and the fever were naturally accompanied and 
followed by all those other maladies which result from in- 
sufficiency and unsuitability of food. The potato blight con- 
tinued with varying virulence until 185 1, its existence being 
marked by the prevalence in more or less severe epidemics of 
dysentery, which carried off 5,492 persons in 1846, 25,757 i n 
1847, the annual totals swelling, until in 1849 the deaths 
from this disease alone amounted to 29,446 ; 6 cholera, which 
destroyed 35,989 lives in 1848-49 ; 7 small-pox, to which 
38,275 persons fell victims in the decennial period between 
1841 and 185 1. 8 The deaths from small-pox, however, did 
not greatly swell the total of mortality between 1845 an d 

1 Census Commissioners' ' Tables of Deaths,' p. 293. 

2 lb. p. 30. 3 lb. p. 243. * lb. s lb, 
6 lb. p. 251. ' lb. p. 252. « lb. 



THE FAMINE 61 

1851. It should be added that as a direct consequence of 
the famine many thousands suffered severely from scurvy, and 
that the recorded cases of ophthalmia swell from 13,812 in 
1849 to 45,947 in 185 1. 1 

In addition to this appalling loss of life from actual disease, 
the number of deaths registered by the Census Commissioners 
under the heading of ' Starvation ' were 6,058 in the year 1 847, 
and 21,770 during the decennial period. But 1 17 deaths from 
starvation were registered in the previous decennial period. 2 
Under heading ' Infirmity, Debility, and Old Age,'" the Com- 
missioners record 10,609 deaths in 1845, 23,285 in 1847 and 
from 1 84 1 to 1 85 1 inclusive, a total of 133,923 ; but they ac- 
knowledge that many of these cases would be more appro- 
priately ranked among the deaths from ' starvation.' 3 

It was the terrible mortality of these epidemics, and espe- 
cially of the fever, that led to the most sinister invention of 
the time. This was the hinged coffin. The coffin was made 
with a movable bottom ; the body was placed in it, the bottom 
unhinged, the body was thrown into the grave, and then the 
coffin was sent back to the workhouse to receive another 
body. Sometimes scores of corpses passed in this way 
through the same coffin. The hinged coffin was used exten- 
sively in Cork. Justin McCarthy, a youth of seventeen, just 
then started on his professional career as a reporter on the 
' Cork Examiner,' many times saw the hinged coffin in actual 
use. In Skibbereen, which was one of the worst scourged 
places or districts, the hinged coffin was perhaps more largely 
used than in any other district. The traveller is to-day pointed 
out, as historic spots of the town, two large pits, in which 
hundreds of bodies found a coffinless grave. 

Appalled by the spread of death, the Ministry were com- 
pelled in 1847 to change their whole procedure. New legis- 
lation was introduced ; all the ideas were abandoned to which 
the Government had adhered with an obstinacy that the 
deaths of tens of thousands of people could not for months 
change. The Irish Relief Act was the official title of the new 

1 Census Commissioners' 'Tables of Deaths, 'p. 253. Asa result, Ireland had 
the largest proportion of blind, compared with its population, except Norway. — lb. 

2 Census Commissioners' 'Tables of Deaths,' p. 253. 3 lb. p. 245. 



62 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

enactment ; it was familiarly known as the Soup Kitchen Act. 
Relief committees were to be formed throughout the different 
unions ; they were to prepare lists of persons who were fit 
subjects for relief ; food was to be given — at reasonable prices 
to some, gratuitously to the absolutely destitute. Here was a 
departure with a vengeance from the solid principles of 
political economy that had been preached with such unction 
to the benighted Irish, with references to Burke, by the 
Scotch and English prigs who had undertaken to manage 
Irish affairs for the Irish people, and had managed them with 
such disastrous results. 

But here again the good intentions of the Government 
and their legislation were defeated by characteristic blunders. 
One of the objects of the Government was to induce the 
people to till their own fields so as to avoid the repetition in 
1 848 of the loss of the harvest that had followed the blunder- 
ing legislation of 1846 ; and, accordingly, it was ordered that 
the relief works should be gradually dropped, and that relief 
through the soup kitchens should take their place. At the end 
of March the number of persons employed was to be reduced 
by twenty per cent., and by May 1 the works were to be 
entirely discontinued. It was intended, too, that by the time 
the relief works came to an end the soup kitchens would 
be in existence ; and thus the people would be supplied with 
a substitute. 

The number of people employed on the relief works was 
gigantic. In the v/eek ending October 3, 1846 — the first week 
of the relief works — the number of persons employed was but 
20,000 ; but in March 1847, when the number on the works 
began to be reduced, the total had reached the enormous number 
of 734,000. The disarrangement of a scheme on which so 
many people depended for food was a project of strange rash- 
ness, and, as usual, it was carried out by the officials of the 
Government in a manner to aggravate all the evil tendencies 
of the original plan. The intention of the Government was 
that the reduction of twenty per cent, was to take place in 
the aggregate, and not in each place — the object, of course, 
being that regard should be had to the different conditions of 
each locality : the officials lowered the number of persons 



THE FAMINE 63 

employed in every district with perfect uniformity. Then the 
intention of the Government was that the Soup Kitchen Act 
should be in full working order when the relief works came 
to an end. By May I, when the whole mighty army of three- 
quarters of a million of people were turned away from work, 
there was not a single relief committee in full working order, 
not a single can of soup had, in all probability, been manu- 
factured. The result was that there was in 1847, as there had 
been in 1846, a hideous interregnum during which some of the 
worst sufferings of the famine days were repeated. 

But when the scheme did get into working order, it proved 
on the whole effective and beneficial. Deaths from starvation 
came to an end ; fever grew less intense in the hospitals ; and 
the fields were fairly well tilled. Thus the severest verdict on 
the early incompetence of the Government was passed by the 
results of their own later legislation. And, indeed, with an 
appalling candour, the Ministers themselves confessed to their 
own tragic mistake. In the preamble to the Soup Kitchen 
Act the measure is justified : it has become necessary because, 
' by reason of the great increase of destitution in Ireland, 
sufficient relief could not be given ' under the Labour Rate 
Act. 1 M. Jules Sandeau tells in one of his stories how a royal 
prince gave the child of a faithful Breton family a smile, and 
comments that the royal smile had been purchased by three 
lives. The preamble to the Soup Kitchen Act had been pur- 
chased by many and many thousands of lives that might 
have been saved. 

But all these things came too late, and especially too late 
to retain the population. Emigration received a terrible 
impetus, and the people fled in a frenzy of grief and despair 
from their doomed land. But even in their flight they were 

1 The testimony is overwhelming that if the policy of the Soup Kitchen Act 
had been originally adopted, a large amount of the horrors of the famine would 
have been prevented. ' The cost of the Kenmare soup kitchen,' reports the 
Relief Committee, ' from April 25 to September 1 amounted to 2,205/. l 3 s - 4^- > 
the amount of money paid for public works in the same district from Novem- 
ber 23, 1846, to May 1 was 5,583/., during which time the people were dying on 
the roads and dropping in the streets. Since the soup kitchens were set on foot, we 
can safely affirm that not one human being died from starvation.'' — Census Com- 
missioners, p. 290. 



64 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

pursued by the demons they had endeavoured to leave be- 
hind. The brotherhood of humanity, powerless to frame just 
laws and to give national rights, asserted itself in disease 
and death. To England, as the nearest refuge, the Irish 
exiles first fled. No less than 180,000 are said to have 
landed in Liverpool between Jan. 15 and May 4, 1847. 1 In 
Glasgow, between June 15 and August 17, 26,335 arrived 
from Ireland. Many were ' aged people unfit for labour ; ' out 
of 1,150 patients in the Glasgow fever hospital at the period, 
750 were Irish. 2 At last the Government had to interfere 
to protect the English people from the horrors which the 
errors and folly of British administration had created in 
Ireland. An Order in Council was issued by which deck 
passengers were subjected to quarantine. Shortly afterwards, 
at the request of the Government, the fares for deck pas- 
sengers were increased by the owners of four steamships 
plying between England and Ireland. These passengers 
were all Irish tenants, fleeing from their farms, voluntarily 
. or by compulsion, through hunger or through eviction. 

Vast masses tried to make their way to America. In the 
year 1845, 74,969 persons emigrated from Ireland ; in 1846 
the number had risen to 105,955 ; during 1847 it rose to 
215,444. No means were taken to preserve these poor people 
from the rapacity of shipowners. The landlords, delighted at 
getting rid of them, made bargains for their conveyance whole- 
sale and at small prices ; and in those days emigrant-ships 
were under no sanitary restrictions of any effectiveness. Thus 
the emigrants, already half-starved and fever-stricken were 
pushed into berths that ' rivalled the cabins of Mayo, or the 
fever-sheds of Skibbereen.' ' Crowded and filthy, carrying 
double the legal number of passengers, who were ill-fed and 
imperfectly clothed, and having no doctor on board, the 
holds,' says an eyewitness, ' were like the Black Hole of 
Calcutta, and deaths in myriads.' 3 

The statistics of mortality bear out these words. Of 493 
passengers during the year in the 'Queen,' 136 died on the 
voyage ; of 552 in the ' Avon/ 236 died ; of 476 in the ' Vir- 

1 Census Commissioners, p. 305. '- lb. 

3 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, p. 531. 



THE FAMINE 65 

ginius,' 267 died; of 440 on the ' Larch,' 108 died and 150 
were seriously diseased. 89,783 persons altogether embarked 
for Canada in 1847. The Chief Secretary for Ireland re- 
ported with regard to these that 6,100 perished on the voyage ; 
4,100 on their arrival ; 5,200 in hospital; 1,900 in towns to 
which they repaired. ' From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, 
along the borders of our great river, on the shores of Lakes 
Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of emigration has ex- 
tended, are to be found one unbroken chain of graves, where 
repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in a com- 
mingled heap, no stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand 
and upwards have gone down to their graves.' l 

1 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, p. 53 2 - 



66 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE GREAT CLEARANCES. 

It was at the moment when Ireland was being scourged with 
all these plagues that her political leaders aggravated her 
sufferings by their dissensions. It is not my intention at 
this moment to enter upon a discussion as to the persons on 
whom responsibility for these dissensions must rest ; perhaps 
events were too powerful for any of the men engaged ; and 
the episode may be one of those which show how impotent are 
the bravest hearts and the strongest wills and minds against 
a combination of untoward circumstances. For the Irish 
people of to-day the moral to be drawn from the disasters 
which these dissensions brought on their country is much 
more important than the discussion of the now academical 
question of which side was most to blame. 

It has already been told that the rise of the ' Nation ' 
newspaper introduced into the counsels of O'Connell a new 
element, which he found it impossible to control. As 
disaster came upon the country these differences were bound 
to increase ; defeat outside being always the solvent of unity 
inside a political organisation. The hideous magnitude of 
the sufferings of Ireland at this moment, too, was another 
element which was bound to increase the tendency to discord. 
The young and strong and brave can never reconcile them- 
selves to the gospel that there is such a thing in this world as 
inevitable evil. The sight of so many thousands of people 
perishing miserably naturally suggested a frenzied temper, 
and the extreme course that such a temper begets. Among 
the young men, therefore, who gathered round the leaders 
of the ' Nation ' newspaper, there was a constant feeling 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 67 

that enough was not being done to save the people. 
O'Connell, on the other hand, was now approaching the close 
of a long and busy life. As has been already mentioned, he 
had been at the period when the famine broke out already 
suffering for some years from the lethargising influence of 
brain disease ; and there was, therefore, on his side as strong 
a tendency towards lethargy as there was on the other side 
to the activity of frenzy or despair. It would take me far 
beyond my purpose to go through the details of the many 
questions upon which the two sides came into collision. One 
of the great causes of the split between Young and Old 
Ireland was in reference to what are called the ' peace reso- 
lutions.' Some of the utterances of the Young Irelanders 
had suggested the employment of physical force under certain 
circumstances ; and O'Connell, whose alarms were fed and 
increased by disreputable retainers, and by his eldest son — an 
intellectual pigmy of gigantic ambition — insisted upon the 
Repeal Association solemnly renewing its adhesion to the 
resolutions. These resolutions, passed at its formation, laid 
down the memorable doctrine that no political reform was 
worth purchasing by the shedding of even one drop of blood. 
It is hard to believe that O'Connell ever did accept in its 
entirety the doctrine that physical force was not a justifiable 
expedient under any imaginable circumstances. There is no 
record in his speeches — at least, none that I remember — of 
his reprobation of the American Colonies for having laid the 
foundation of their liberty and of their present greatness in 
armed insurrection. There is a famous speech, which formed 
part of the case of the Crown against him, in which he spoke 
of himself as the Bolivar of Ireland — and the triumphs of 
Bolivar were not gained without the shedding of blood. All 
O'Connell probably meant to say, in the moments when he 
was free from a certain kind of devotional ecstasy, was that 
Ireland was so weak at that time when compared to 
England, that an exercise of physical force could have no 
possible chance of success, and that it was as well to recon- 
cile the people to their impotence by raising it to the dignity 
of a great moral principle. The Young Irelanders left the 
Repeal Association ; and from this time forward there were 

f 2 



68 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

rival organisations, rival leaders, and rival policies in the 
National party. 

O'Connell did not survive to see the complete wreck of 
the vast organisation which he had held together for so long 
a period. Rarely has a great, and on the whole successful, 
career ended in gloom so appalling and so unbroken. The 
imprisonment of 1 843 was so ignoble an ending to the glorious 
promise and the wild and tempestuous triumph of that period 
that it probably gave his spirit a shock from which it never 
recovered. He worked on as energetically as ever, for he 
was a man whose industry never paused. But both he and 
his policy had lost their prestige. The young and ardent 
began to question his power, and still more to doubt his 
policy. Then came 1846 and 1847, with the people whom 
he had pledged himself to bring into the promised land of 
self-government arid prosperity dying of hunger and disease, 
fleeing as from an accursed spot, and bound to the fiery 
wheel of oppression more securely than ever. In breaking 
health and with broken spirits the old man fought doggedly 
on. On April 3, 1846, he delivered a lengthened speech 
to the House of Commons, of which an historic but an 
entirely inaccurate description is given in Lord Beaconsfield's 
' Life of Lord George Bentinck.' 

— .The speech, whether supplied to the newspapers or not, 
appears in ' Hansard ' ; and, however much the voice and other 
physical attributes of O'Connell may have appeared to have 
decayed, this speech, in its selection of evidence, and in its 
arrangement of facts and its presentation of the whole case 
against the land system of Ireland, may be read even to-day 
as the completest and most convincing speech of the times 
on the question. In Dublin, too, the old man attended the 
relief committees day after day. He spoke in the House of 
Commons for the last time in February 1847, and then it 
was that he displayed that utter debility which is transposed 
in the ' Life of Bentinck ' to the April of the previous year. 
He was next day seriously ill, and was ordered change of 
air. He went abroad, and was everywhere met by demon- 
strations of respect and affection. But his heart was broken. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 69 

A gloom had settled over him which nothing could shake off. 
He did not even reach the goal of his journey. He died at 
Genoa on May 15, 1847. His last will was that his heart 
should be sent to Rome, and his body to Ireland. He lies in 
Glasnevin Cemetery. 

Meantime, the removal of his imposing personality from 
Irish politics aggravated the dissensions between Old and 
Young Ireland. O'Connell was largely dominated in his 
later years by his eldest son, John O'Connell ; and the father 
bent much of his efforts towards handing on to his son the 
dignity of popular leader. But there is no divine right in 
popular command, except that which is given by supreme 
talents ; and John O'Connell was utterly devoid of qualifica- 
tions for the new position. He was weak, vain, and shallow ; 
and the disproportion between his pretensions and his abili- 
ties did much to aggravate the bitterness and accelerate the 
rupture between the two schools of political thought. 

The evils of the country grew daily worse ; hope from 
Parliamentary agitation died in face of a failure so colossal 
as that of O'Connell ; and some of the Young Irelanders, 
seized with a divine despair, resolved to try what physical 
force might bring. 

The first important apostle of this new gospel was John 
Mitchel — one of the strangest, most picturesque, and strongest 
figures of Irish political struggles. He was the son of an 
Ulster Unitarian clergyman ; and he was one of the early 
contributors to the ' Nation.' He separated in time from Sir 
(Mr.) Charles Gavan Duffy, and started a paper on his own 
account. In this paper insurrection was openly preached ; 
and especially insurrection against the land system. The 
people were asked not to die themselves, nor let their wives 
and children die, while their fields were covered with food 
which had been produced by the sweat of their brows and by 
their own hands. It was pointed out that the reason why all 
this food was sent from a starving to a prosperous nation was 
that the rent of the landlord might be paid, and that the 
rent should therefore be attacked ; in short, Mitchel attempted 
to start a ' No Rent ' movement. 

The Ministry, in order to cope with such writing and the 



;c THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

other results of a period of universal hunger and disease, suc- 
ceeded in having a whole code of coercion laws passed. The 
Cabinet had changed its political complexion. The fall of 
Peel had, as has been seen, been brought about by the defeat 
of his Coercion Bill through a combination of the Whigs, the 
Protectionists, and the O'Connellites. Lord John Russell had 
been the leader of the Whigs in the triumphant attack on 
coercion ; and Lord John Russell, now transformed from the 
leader of Opposition to the head of the Government, brought 
in Coercion Bills himself. 

Nor was this the only way in which the Whigs in office 
borrowed all the weapons of the Tories. It has already been 
told how, when O'Connell was tried and convicted by packed 
juries and partisan judges, the Whig leaders in the House 
of Commons — Lord John Russell, Mr. (afterwards Lord) 
Macaulay, and others — denounced jury-packing as the vilest 
and meanest of expedients to crush political opponents; 
within a year or so of these declarations the Whigs were 
packing juries before partisan judges, and were getting ver- 
dicts to order which sent political opponents to transporta- 
tion beyond the seas. Nay, the Whigs adopted expedients 
that, as they were not employed, we may charitably assume 
were too strong for even the stomachs of the Tories. There 
was in these years in Dublin a sheet called the 'World,' a black- 
mailing organ, somewhat after the type of certain low papers 
in our day in London. Its editor — a man named Birch — had 
been tried and convicted of attempting to obtain hush-money 
from helpless men and women whom chance had placed in 
his power. Lord Clarendon, the Whig Lord-Lieutenant, was 
forced to confess in a trial ] in public court some years after- 
wards, that he had given Birch as much as between 2,000/. 
and 3,000/. in order to turn his slanderous pen against Duffy, 
Mitchel, Smith O'Brien, and the other leaders of the Young 
Ireland party. It is such recollections, as well as some others 
which will be presented in this book, that account for the un- 
questioning love and confidence which Irish Nationalists have 
for the professions and promises of English Liberals. 

1 Birch v. Redington. Redington was the Irish Under Secretary of those 
days, and Birch took an action against him for the recovery of his wages. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 71 

Mitchel was the first of the Young Irelanders who was 
attacked. He was brought to trial ; Lord John Russell, 
questioned in the House of Commons about the trial a few 
days before it took place, pledged himself that it should be a 
fair trial. He had written, he declared, to his noble friend 
(Lord Clarendon) that he trusted there would not arise any 
charge of any kind of unfairness as to the composition of the 
juries, as, for his own part, ' he would rather see those parties 
acquitted than that there should be any such unfairness.' 
Most Englishmen who read this statement came to the con- 
clusion — the very natural conclusion — that the word of an 
English Prime Minister thus solemnly pledged was carried 
out ; and if there were any complaints by Irish members 
afterwards, they were dismissed as the emanations of the 
hopeless mendacity or the incurable folly of a race of per- 
sistent grumblers. Yet was the pledge most flagrantly broken ; 
and the packing of the jury of John Mitchel under the 
premiership of Lord John Russell was as open, as relentless, 
as shameless, as the packing of the jury of O'Connell under 
the premiership of Sir Robert Peel. The Crown challenged 
thirty-nine of the jurors — of these thirty-nine, nineteen were 
Catholics, the rest were Protestants suspected of National 
leanings — with the final result that there was not a single 
Catholic on the jury, and that the Protestants were of the 
Orange class who would be quite willing to hang Mitchel, or 
any other man of his opinions, without the formality of trial, 
or without any evidence at all. 

With such a jury Mitchel was, of course, convicted. He 
was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation ; in a few 
hours after the sentence he was in a Government boat, on the 
way already to the land to which he was now exiled. The 
story of Mitchel's trial points other lessons beside the men- 
dacity of Whig promises. The prompt throttling of a man 
who was calling upon people to fight rather than starve and 
allow their children to starve by apparently due process of law 
in the capital of his own country, and by the representatives of 
the power which was the parent of all this national starvation, 
was assuredly a tragedy that might have eclipsed the gaiety 
of at least the chief town of Ireland, or might have stung to 



72 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

frenzy its populace. But Mitchel himself tells how, as he was 
being driven to his doom through the city, he saw a great 
crowd of people hurrying somewhere in evidently agreeable 
anticipation, and he learned that they were going to a flower 
show ! One of the questions debated at the time most 
seriously was whether Mitchel should be allowed to be taken 
out of the country without some attempt at rescue. His own 
expectation was that the Government would never be allowed 
to conquer him without a struggle, and that his sentence 
would be the longed-for and the necessary signal for the rising. 
But it was deemed wisest by the other leaders of the Young 
Ireland party that the attempt at insurrection should be post- 
poned until the people were organised and armed. By suc- 
cessive steps these men were in their turn driven to extremi- 
ties, and to the conviction that an attempt at insurrection 
should be made. 

The leader of this movement was Mr. Smith O'Brien. 
Mr. O'Brien was the member of an aristocratic family. His 
brother afterwards became Lord Inchiquin, and was the 
nearest male relative to the Marquis of Thomond. For years 
he had been a member of the English Liberal party, honestly 
convinced that the Liberal party would remedy all the wrongs 
of the Irish people. But as time went on, and all these evils 
seemed to become aggravated instead of relieved, he was 
driven slowly and unwillingly into the belief that the legisla- 
tive Union was the real source of all the evils of his country ; 
and he joined the Repeal party under O'Connell. By suc- 
cessive steps, which I have not time to trace here, he was 
driven into the ranks of Young Ireland, and by degrees into 
revolution. When he, Mr. John Blake Dillon, Mr. D'Arcy 
M'Gee, and Mr. (now Sir) Charles Gavan Duffy were finally 
forced into the attempt to create an insurrection, they pro- 
bably had a strong feeling that the attempt was hopeless, 
and that they were called upon to make it rather through the 
calls of honour than the chances of success. The attempt 
at all events proved a disastrous failure. After an attack 
on a police barrack at Ballingarry, the small force which 
O'Brien had been able to call and keep together was scattered. 
He and the greater number of the leaders were arrested 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 73 

after a few days, and were put on their trial. The juries were 
packed as before, the judges were partisans of the Orange 
school, and O'Brien and the rest were convicted, were sen- 
tenced to death, and, this sentence being commuted, were 
transported. Dillon and M'Gee succeeded in escaping to 
America. 

This was the end of the Young Ireland party. The party 
of O'Connell did not survive much longer. In 1847 there was 
a general election. The graphic account of that election in 
Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's book is one of the most depressing 
and most instructive chapters in Irish history, and makes 
several years of Irish history intelligible. The election was 
fought out between the Young Irelanders and Conciliation 
Hall — the place where O'Connell's Repeal Association used to 
meet — on the principle whether there should or should not be 
a pledge against taking office. 

The idea of £-avan Duffy and the other Young Irelanders 
was an independent Irish party — independent of Liberal as 
of Tory Governments. But O'Connell's heirs, as he himself, 
taught a very different creed. It was O'Connell's persistent 
idea that his supporters were justified in taking offices under 
the Crown. It is easy to understand, though it may be hard 
to forgive, his reasons for adopting such a policy. When 
O'Connell started, as to a large extent when he ended, his 
political career, every post of power in Ireland was held 
by the enemies of the popular cause. The Lord-Lieutenant, 
the Chief Secretary, all the judges, all the county court 
barristers, all the sheriffs, all the men in any public position, 
great or small, were Protestants, and most of them Orange 
Conservatives. Irish history teaches this lesson, if no other, 
that apparently popular and even Liberal institutions may 
exist in name and be the mask for the worst vices of un- 
checked despotism. Ireland had all the forms which in 
England are the guarantees of freemen and freedom, but 
these forms became the bulwarks and instruments of tyranny. 
It was in vain that there were in Ireland judges who had the 
same independence of the Crown as their brethren in England, 
if, from violent political partisanship, they could be relied upon 
to do the behests of the Government as safely as if they were 



74 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the creatures of the Crown. Trial by jury was a ' mockery, a 
delusion, and a snare,' if it meant trial, not by one's peers, but 
by a carefully selected number of one's bitterest political and 
religious opponents. And no laws could establish political or 
social or religious equality when their administration was left 
to the unchecked caprice of a hierarchy of unscrupulous 
political partisans. 

O'Connell found how true this was in the days that suc- 
ceeded Catholic Emancipation ; and he thought, therefore, that 
one of the first necessities of Irish progress was that the 
judiciary and the other official bodies of the country should 
be manned by men belonging to the same faith and sympa- 
thising with the political sentiments of the majority of their 
countrymen. 

There were some other reasons, too, of a less creditable 
character. O'Connell was the leader of a democratic move- 
ment with no revenue save such as the voluntary subscriptions 
of his followers supplied. It was not an unwelcome relief 
to his cause if occasionally he was able to transform the 
pensioners on his funds into pensioners on the coffers of the 
State. It is to be remembered, too, that at this period the 
Irish leader had a much more circumscribed class from which 
to draw his Parliamentary supporters than at the present day. 
The property qualifications still existed ; a member of Par- 
liament was obliged to have 300/. a year to be a borough, 
and 600/. a year to be a county member. There are many 
amusing and many sad stories of the strange characters 
which this necessity compelled O'Connell to introduce as 
advocates of the sacred cause of Irish nationality. There 
were large classes of the population who, while they had the 
property qualification, were in other respects entirely unsuited 
for the position of members of a popular party. The land- 
lords were almost to a man on the side of existing abuses 
and the greater number of the members of this body whom 
O'Connell was able to recruit to his ranks were declasses. 
They were usually men of extravagant habits and of vicious 
lives, and politics was the last desperate card with which their 
fortunes were to be marred or mended. Next, the consti- 
tuencies of Ireland had at this moment a very narrow electo- 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 75 

rate. It was all very well for half a million of people to meet 
O'Connell at Tara, or at any other of the monster meetings, 
and to show that he commanded, as never did popular leader 
before, the affections, the opinions, and the right arms of a 
unanimous nation. But when it came to the time for obtain- 
ing a Parliamentary supporter — the only available weapon 
for his struggle with English Ministries — it was not upon 
the voice of the people that the decision rested. He could 
carry most of the counties, even though support of him meant 
sentences of eviction, and, through eviction, of death or of 
exile to thousands of his adherents. In the boroughs it was 
half a dozen shopkeepers, face to face with the always im- 
pending bankruptcy of small towns in an impoverished 
country, who had the decision of an election in their hands. 
This is a central fact in the consideration of O'Connell's 
career, and must always be taken as supplying at least some 
explanation of his many mistakes and his many disastrous 
failures. Finally, O'Connell, in this matter of place-hunting, 
as in so many others, was led astray by that reliance upon 
the English Whig party which is the great and the inefface- 
able blot upon his career. 

The result of this theory of O'Connell's was the creation 
in Ireland of a school of politicians which has been at once 
her dishonour and her bane. This was the race of Catholic 
place-hunters. Throughout the following pages men of this 
type play a large part ; it will be found that in exact propor- 
tion to their success and number were the degradation and the 
deepening misery of their country ; that for years the struggle 
for,Irish prosperity and self-government was impeded mainly 
through them ; and that hope for the final overthrow of the 
whole vast structure of wrong in Ireland showed some chance 
of realisation for the first time when they were expelled for 
ever from Irish political life. 

The way in which the system worked was this. A pro- 
fligate landlord, or an aspiring but briefless barrister, was 
elected for an Irish constituency as a follower of the popular 
leader of the day and as the mouthpiece of his principles. 
When he entered the House of Commons he soon gave it to 
be understood by the distributors of State patronage that he 



76 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

was open to a bargain. The time came when in the party 
divisions his vote was of consequence, and the bargain was then 
struck — the vote from him, and the office from them. 

Under O'Connell this hideous system had not reached the 
proportions to which it afterwards attained ; but it had gone 
so far as to create a vast scandal ; and, along with the 
wretched tail which in the course of his long struggle 
O'Connell had gathered about him, gave that uncleanness 
to his proceedings which excited the just indignation of the 
young and ardent and high-minded men who formed the 
Young Ireland party. The final event that made separation 
between O'Connell and the Young Irelanders inevitable was 
the struggle between the demand for an independent Irish 
party, with no mercy to place-hunters, and the resolve of 
O'Connell to stand by the old and evil system of compromise. 
Richard Lalor Sheil, one of the most eloquent colleagues of 
O'Connell in the old struggle for Catholic Emancipation, had 
never joined in the agitation for Repeal, had kept out of all 
popular movements — some said because the despotic will of 
the great tribune made life intolerable to any but slaves — and 
had in time sunk to the level of a Whig office-holder. In 
1846, having been appointed Master of the Mint in the 
Ministry of Lord John Russell, he stood for Dungarvan, and 
the Young Irelanders demanded that he should be opposed 
by a man who was in favour not of the government of Ireland 
by English Ministers, whether Liberal or Tory, but of the 
government of Ireland by the Irish people themselves. 
O'Connell stood by his old associate and his old creed, and 
Sheil was elected. 

The struggle on this point, which had raged in the days 
of O'Connell, burst out with even greater fury when he was 
dead ; and the Young Irelanders had to contend with his 
puny and contemptible successor. The Young Irelanders 
proposed that no man should be elected who did not pledge 
himself to take no office under the Crown. And assuredly 
if such a pledge were ever necessary or justifiable it was at 
that moment. Between Parliament and Ministers, between 
the land laws and the landlords, the Irish nation was being 
murdered ; and the demand for relief should come, not from 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 77 

beggars seeking the pence of the Treasury, but from inde- 
pendent men caring only for the redress of the hideous 
wrong and the cure of the awful suffering of their country. 

But Mr. John O'Connell and the Repeal Association re- 
fused to accede to any such pledge ; and at this supreme 
crisis, raised those false side-issues which are the favourite 
resort of unscrupulous traffickers in political struggles. A 
favourite expedient was to whisper doubts of the religious 
orthodoxy of the Young Irelanders ; and their proposals being 
first described as revolutionary^ dread warnings were by an 
easy transition drawn from the sanguinary teachings and 
acts of the revolutionaries of France. But the great side- 
issue was the attitude the Young Irelanders had adopted 
towards O'Connell. They were described as having ' murdered 
the Liberator.' The disappearance of O'Connell, especially in 
circumstances of such tragic and pitiful gloom, had produced 
on the whole Irish people the impression which Mrs. Carlyle 
so well describes as her feeling when the news came to Eng- 
land that Byron was dead. It seemed as if the sun or moon 
had suddenly dropped out of the heavens. In such a condition 
of the popular mind it was easy to raise a howl of execration 
against the men who had opposed his policy ; the Young 
Irelanders were everywhere denounced ; in many places they 
were set upon by mobs, and were in danger of their lives. 

The revulsion of public feeling against them threw great dif- 
ficulties in the way of the policy which they recommended : and 
that policy did not receive anything like a fair hearing. Their 
candidates were everywhere defeated, and in their stead were 
chosen men who were openly for sale. The one title for election 
in many cases was a hasty adhesion to the Repeal Associa- 
tion just before the general election. The subscription to this 
body was $1 : hence these men came to be known as the ' Five 
Pound Repealers.' Thus, instead of seventy independent and 
honest Irish representatives, there was returned a motley gang 
of as disreputable and needy adventurers as ever trafficked in 
the blood and tears of a nation. The expected result soon 
followed. Of the entire number no less than twenty after- 
wards accepted places for themselves, and twenty more were 
continually pestering the Government Whips for places for 



78 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

their dependents. Mr. John O'Connell himself had refused 
to take the pledge against office-taking, on the ground that if 
the name he bore was not a sufficient guarantee, he would 
condescend to no more. The guarantee was scarcely trust- 
worthy ; for he had at the time a brother and two brothers- 
in-law and a train of cousins in office. He himself, within a 
short time afterwards, was being trained as a captain of 
militia to fight against the men whom the sight of their 
country's ruin was driving to the desperate resort of rebellion ; 
and, finally, ended as Clerk of the Hanaper. 

Thus the Repeal party broke up, and Ireland was left 
without an advocate in Parliament. The ruin and helpless- 
ness of the country was now complete. Insurrection had 
been tried and had failed ; constitutional agitation had pro- 
duced a gang of scoundrels who were ready to sell them- 
selves to the highest bidder. Ireland, starving, plague-stricken, 
disarmed, unrepresented, lay at the mercy of the British 
Government and of the Irish landlords. It will not be un- 
instructive to see what use the two classes made of their 
omnipotence over the country which death, hunger, and 
plague, abortive rebellion and political treachery had given 
over to their hands. 

First as to the landlords. The potato crop in 1848 and 
1849 had again failed, and there were throughout the country 
the same scenes — especially in 1849 — of starvation and plague 
as in 1846 and 1847. In 1848, 2,043,505 persons received 
poor law relief, 610,463 being in the workhouses and 
1,433,042 receiving out-door relief. 1 Fever and dysentery 
raged in the workhouses, 2 the gaols, 3 the schools, 4 and in 
some places along the western coast with such destructive - 
ness as to almost entirely depopulate them. ' Along the 
coast of Connemara,' says a medical writer, ' for near thirty 
miles, where the villages are very small and hundreds of 
cabins detached, sickness and death walked hand in hand 
until they nearly depopulated the whole coast.' 5 In Mayo 
hundreds of people died of starvation ; G in the townland of 
Moyard, County Galway, five persons — four sons and a 

1 Census Commissioners, p. 310. 2 lb. p. 310. 3 lb. p. 311. 

* lb. '- lb. p. 312. 6 lb. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 79 

daughter — died in one family ; l in Ballinahinch, in the same 
county, six persons in the same family died — the husband, two 
daughters, and three sons ; 2 in Ballinasloe, in the same 
county, eight persons died in the same family. ' The survi- 
vors have endeavoured to live on nettles and watercresses.' 3 
Though there were 41,083 fewer deaths than in 1847, the 
total reached the enormous figure of 208,352, and of these 
97,076 died of epidemic — that is, of famine-produced 
diseases. 4 And eventually, although there was a decrease of 
37,285 on the emigration of 1847, no less than 178,159 persons 
left Ireland. 

The failure was not so complete as in 1847, but still it 
was very extensive, and there was terrible and widespread 
suffering. In 1 849 the blight worked more disastrously. The 
potatoes were ' almost universally blighted.' 5 

The year 1 849 was a return to the greater ghastliness and 
more multitudinous horrors of 1847. As in previous years, the 
harvest began with promises of abundance. In May the 
crops looked ' luxuriant and flourishing ' ; 6 but as early as 
June the blight appeared in County Cork and County Tip- 
perary ; in July and August it appeared in several other 
counties. By the 18th of the latter month, in passing along 
the roads in the Mourne district of County Down, ' the 
peaty smell — a symptom of the fatal disaster — was perceived 
distinctly.' By September 14 the report was : ' The potato 
blight has now become unmistakable, changing in one night's 
time the green and healthy-looking appearances of the potato 
stalks to blackness and decay.' October 1 : ' The potatoes are 
bad everywhere.' 7 

As in the autumn of 1845, the people had staked their all 
on the success of the potato crop. ' Should the crop fail,' 
wrote the ' Irish Farmers' Gazette,' 'the country will be in a 
wretched condition, for the poor people have risked their all 
in the planting of potatoes this year.' 8 One of the agricul- 
tural instructors sent out by the Lord-Lieutenant to lecture 
on improved methods cf farming, reports from Roscommon 
instances of people having ' sold their only cow to procure 

1 Census Commissioners, p. 311. 2 lb. 3 lb. p. 312. 

4 lb. p. 314. 5 lb. p. 319. s Ib% p- 3I5 _ 7 ji, m p# 3IS . 8 Ib , p . 3I9 . 



So THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

seed potatoes, and of persons having sold their beds for the 
same purpose.' ! Another instructor gives an account which 
it will be well to remember in reading an account of the 
working of landlordism some pages farther on : ' They ' — the 
tenants—' have nothing now left but the shelter of a miser- 
able cabin, and themselves and the land in a corresponding 
state of misery ; though they are still clinging to their 
huts with the greatest tenacity, and seem better pleased to 
perish in the ruins than surrender what they call their last 
hope of existence.' 2 

The same suffering as in 1847 followed the failure of the 
staple crop. ' The earlier months of 1849,' report the Poor 
Law Commissioners, ' were marked by a greater degree of 
suffering in the western and south-western districts than any 
period since the fatal season of 1846-47. Exhaustion of 
resources by the long continuance of adverse circumstances 
caused a large accession to the ranks of the destitute. 
Clothing had been worn out and parted with to provide food 
or seed in seed time.' 3 

Reports of all kinds present pictures as terrible as those of 
1 847, with deeper elements of tragedy in many cases, as the evils 
of 1 849 came upon a people already exhausted by their dread 
experiences of the previous years. Then there had been 
added another burden to the famine-stricken people in the 
additional taxation imposed by the legislation of the Imperial 
Parliament, for the people had to pay for the legislation that had 
so terribly aggravated their sufferings, and that had murdered 
instead of saving hundreds of thousands of the nation. ' The 
people,' reports one of the agricultural instructors, ' complain 
bitterly [of the immense poor rate] ; they say it will be 
impossible for them to stand the payment of the taxes for 
another season. They likewise say,' adds this instructor, 
' that if they improve their farms, they know in their hearts 
they are doing so for other persons.' 4 

And now for a few pictures of the state of things which 
existed among the people. ' The state of the country here,' 
writes one of the instructors from Clifden, Connemara, as ' in 

1 Census Commisbiontrs, p. 3 J 7-' 2 -^- 

3 lb. p. 320. 4 lb. p. 317. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 81 

many other places, is utterly hopeless, and exhibits the most 
horrifying picture of poverty and destitution. The neglected 
state of the land — the death-like appearance of the people 
crawling from their roofless cabins . . . the pitiful petitions of 
the desponding poor craving that charity which the " rate " 
of 23s. id. to the pound puts out of the power of humanity 
to bestow — some may conceive, but few can describe. It is 
not very likely, indeed, that any good can accrue to such 
people from my visits. "We will not sow, for we cannot 
work without food," is the general answer made to me by 
those patient sufferers.' ! 

' Anything,' writes another instructor from the Ballinrobe 
Union, County Mayo, ' to equal the misery and starved 
appearance of the people here I have not yet seen — no more 
sign of tillage, or any preparation for it, than on the top of a 
barren mountain, though very fine land ... I begged of them 
to prepare the land ; their reply was, " How can a hungry 
man work, sir ? we are all nearly starved ; " and really they 
had starvation in their worn faces ... I meet half-starved 
creatures in the fields everywhere picking weeds and herbs 
to eat them. I have no hesitation in saying that five out of 
six of the really destitute will be dead on July i.' 2 

' Deaths from starvation occur almost daily,' writes 
another instructor from Ballynahinch Estate, Connemara, 
'and the remains of hunger's victims are quietly laid in the 
ground unrecorded.' 3 In the neighbouring islands, ' which 
had quite run out of cultivation,' the inhabitants were 'either 
dead or supported by public relief and by that system of 
petty theft which unfortunately pervades the country, as the 
food supplied is. barely sufficient to enable the living skeletons 
to go in search of a further supply.' 

Finally, here are a few extracts from the newspapers of 
the time : ' The distress in the west of Ireland was very 
great ; many died of want' ' Great destitution at Athlone ; 
never were the poor in so deplorable a condition.' ' A family 
of six lived for one week upon the carcase of an ass in the 
parish of Ballymackey, County Tipperary.' ' Great distress 

1 Census Commissioners, p. 321. 2 lb. 3 lb. 



82 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

in Ulster — people eating ass-flesh.' ' Deaths from starvation 
were reported from Cong, County Mayo, from Lettermore, 
County Tipperary, and also from the County Clare.' 'January 
17 : Twenty-two deaths from famine and destitution reported 
throughout the country.' ' 

As has already been stated, the epidemic of cholera was 
added to the other scourges which, in the latter part of 1848 
and all through 1849, followed on the other epidemics. The 
total number of deaths in 1849 was 240,797, being the 
greatest number for any one year in the decennial period be- 
tween 1 84 1 and 185 1 except 1847. The deaths from zymotic 
diseases were larger than in 1847, being 123,386, which is 
7,021 more than in 1847. 2 

Such, then, was the state of Ireland in these two years. 
I now proceed to describe the conduct of the landlords. It 
would be easy to quote the denunciations of them which appeared 
in the speeches and newspapers even of England, but I have 
thought it a better plan to take up one particular district and 
show the landlords at work there. 

To anybody who desires to obtain a detailed and realistic 
picture of what Irish landlordism in the days of the famine 
really meant, the perusal of the paper No. 1089, entitled 
' Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the Kilrush 
Union,' will be of absorbing interest. The Ministers, in order 
to give Parliament some idea as to the merits of the con- 
troversy between them and the landlords, presented in this 
volume a series of extracts from the report of Captain 
Kennedy, who had been sent down to this union as represen- 
tative of the Poor Law Commissioners. These extracts begin 
on November 25, 1847, and conclude on June 19, 1849. 
They tell over and over again the same tale, until the heart 
grows sick with the repetition of ghastly and almost incredible 
horrors. Kilrush was one of the unions in which neither 
famine nor fever worked with such deadly effect as in some 
other parts of the country. 

1 Freeman's Journal and Saunders's Newsletter, quoted by Census Commis- 
sioners, pp. 320, 321. - Census Commissioners, pp. 323, 324. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 83 

The following extracts from Captain Kennedy's report 
are given without comment, and may be trusted to speak 
for themselves : — 

November. 25, 1847.— An immense number of small landholders 
are under ejectment, or notice to quit, even where the rents have 
been paid up. 1 

February n, 1848. — . . . upwards of 120 houses have been 
'■tumbled' 1 on one property within a few weeks, containing families to a 
greater number, many of whom are burrowing behind the ditches, 
without the means of procuring shelter. 2 

March 16, 1848. — We admitted a considerable number of 
paupers, among whom were some of the most appalling cases of 
destitution and suffering it has ever been my lot to witness. The state 
of most of these wretched creatures is traceable to the numerous 
evictions which have lately taken place in the union. When driven 
from their cabins they betake themselves to the ditches or the shelter 
of some bank, and there exist like animals, till starvation or the 
inclemency of the weather drives them to the workhouse. There 
were three cartloads of these creatures, who could not walk, brought 
for admission yesterday, some in fever, some suffering from dysentery, 
and all from want of food. 3 

March 23, 1848. — Whole districts are being cleared and re-let in 
larger holdings. 4 

March 28, 1848. — I have the honour to inform you that the 
Kilrush workhouse contained two above the authorised number, on 
yesterday. This rapid filling is attributable to the numerous evictions 
on the 25th instant and demolition of cabins. To meet the emergency 
I immediately proceeded with Mr. Meagher, Vice-Guardian, and 
selected fifty cases for discharge, principally widows with one child 
dependent, and some elderly widows without any. I anticipate a 
considerable pressure during the next fortnight. Cabins are being 
thrown dozen in all directions, and it is really extraordinary and, to me, 
unaccountable where or how the evicted find shelter? 

Ma?rh 30, 1848. — . . . The pressure is coming, and will con- 
tinue ; and this will not surprise the Commissioners when I state my 
conviction that 1,000 cabins have been levelled in this union within a 
very few months. The occupants of many of these were induced 
to give them up on receipt of a small sum of money ; and that once 
spent they must seek the workhouse or starve. 6 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 3. 2 lb. 3 lb. * lb. 

5 lb. p. 4. 6 lb. 

G 2 



84 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

April 6, 1848. — A timely, well organised, and well superintended 
labour test, in and out of doors, is the only hope of stemming the 
torrent. The destitution in degree and character is, I trust, unknown 
elsewhere ; improvident, ignorant, thriftless parents, scarcely human in 
habits and intelligence, only present themselves, with nine or ten skeleton 
children, when they themselves can no longer support the pangs of hunger 
and their wretched offspring are beyond recovery. The state of this 
union must be seen to be believed or comprehended. 1 

April 6, T848. — While hundreds are being turned out houseless 
and helpless daily on one small property in Killard division, no less 
than twenty-three houses, containing probably one hundred souls, 
were tumbled in one day, March 27. I believe the extent of land 
occupied with these twenty-three houses did not exceed fifty acres. 
The suffering and misery attendant upon these wholesale evictions is 
indescribable. 2 The number of houseless paupers in this union is 
beyond my calculation ; those evicted crowd neighbouring cabins and 
villages, and disease is necessarily generated. On its first appearance 
the wretched sufferer, and probably the whole family to which he or 
she belongs, is ruthlessly turned out by the roadside. The popular 
dread of fever or dysentery seems to excuse any degree of inhumanity. 
The workhouse and temporary hospital are crowded to the utmost 
extent they can possibly contain ; the crowding of the fever hospital 
causes me serious anxiety. The relieving officer has directions to 
send no more in : yet, notwithstanding this caution, panic-stricken 
and unnatural parents frequently send in a donkey-load of children 
in fever a distance of fourteen or fifteen miles for admission. How 
to dispose of them I know not. 3 

April 8, 1848. — I calculate that 6,000 houses have been levelled 
since November, and expect 500 more before July. 4 

April 13, 1848. — Destitution, I am concerned to say, steadily 
increases, together with a corresponding increase of disease. The 
numerous evictions tend to this when (as is frequently the case) 
thirty or forty cabins are levelled in a single day ; the inmates crowd 
into neighbouring ones till disease is generated, and they are then 
thrown out without consideration or mercy. The relieving officers 
thus find them, and send them to the hospital when beyond medical 
aid. These wholesale evictions are most embarrassing to the 
guardians. The wretched and half-witted occupiers are too often 
deluded by the specious promises of under-agents and bailiffs, and 
induced to throw down their own cabin for a paltry consideration of a 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 4. " lb. p. 5. 3 lb. 4 lb. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 85 

few shillings, and an assurance of 'outdoor relief.' I am compiling 
a return of the number of evictions in each electoral division since 
last November, with the extent of holding and amount of yearly rent. 

April 16, 1848. — In the week ending April 8, the number of 
'cases' receiving out-door relief numbered 4,594, making a total of 
14,292 souls, at a cost of 296/. 7s. nd. for the week. There has 
been considerable increase in the week ending the 15th instant. I 
do not anticipate the numbers will stop short of 18,000 before 
August. This will be understood from what I have hitherto stated of 
the utter absence of employment, and the large number evicted and 
houseless. 1 

June 27, 1848. — Several of those wretched dens were without 
light or air, and I was obliged to light a piece of bog-fir to see where 
the sick lay, while many good and substantial houses lay in ruins 
about them. Whatever the necessity, or whatever future good these 
clearances may effect, they are productive of an amount of present 
suffering and mortality which would scare the proprietors were they 
to see it. And the evil still goes on. During the last week about 
sixty more souls have been left houseless on one small property, to 
crowd into the already over-crowded cabins and create disease. 2 

July 5, 1848. — Twenty thousand, or one-fourth of the population, 
are now in receipt of daily food, either in or out of the workhouse. 
Disease has unfortunately kept pace with destitution, and the high 
mortality at one period since last November, in and out of the work- 
house, was most distressing. I have frequently been astonished by 
the sudden and unexpected pressure from certain localities ; this 
naturally induced an inquiry into the causes, and eventually into a 
general review of the whole union. The result of this inquiry has 
convinced me that destitution has been increased and its chai'acter 
fearfully aggravated by the system of wholesale evictions which has been 
adopted ; that a fearful amount of disease and mortality has also re- 
sulted from the same causes, I cannot doubt. I have painful experi- 
ence of it daily. To make this understood, I may state, in general 
terms, that about 900 houses, containing probably 4,000 occupants, 
have been levelled in this union since last November. The 
wretchedness, ignorance, and helplessness of the poor on the western 
coast of this union prevent them seeking a shelter elsewhere ; and, 
to use their own phrase, ' they don't know where to face ' ; they 
linger about the localities for weeks or months, burrowing behind 
the ditches, under a few broken rafters of their former dwelling, 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 6. 2 lb. p. 7. 



86 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

refusing to enter the workhouse till the parents are broken down and 
the children half starved, when they come into the workhouse to 
swell the mortality one by one. Those who obtain a temporary 
shelter in adjoining cabins are not more fortunate. Fever and dysen- 
tery shortly make their appearance, when those affected are put out 
by the roadside as carelessly and ruthlessly as if they were animals ; 
when frequently, after days and nights of exposure, they are sent in 
by the relieving officers when in a hopeless state. These inhuman 
acts are induced by the popular terror of fever. I have frequently 
reported cases of this sort. The misery attendant upon these whole- 
sale and simultaneous evictions is frequently aggravated by hunting 
these ignorant, helpless creatures off the property, from which they 
perhaps have never wandered five 7?iiles. It is not an unusual oc- 
currence to see forty or fifty houses levelled in one day, and orders 
given that no remaining tenant or occupier should give them even a 
night's shelter. I have known some ruthless acts committed by 
drivers and sub-agents, but no doubt according to law, however re- 
pulsive to humanity ; wretched hovels pulled down, where the in- 
mates were in a -helpless stale of fever and nakedness, and left by the 
roadside for days. As many as 300 souls, creatures of the most 
helpless class, have been left houseless in one day, and the suffering 
and misery resulting therefrom attributed to insufficient relief or mal- 
administration of the law : it would not be a matter of surprise that 
it failed altogether in such localities as those I allude to. When 
relieved, charges of profuse expenditure are readily preferred. The 
evicted crowd into the back lanes and wretched hovels of the towns 
and villages, scattering disease and dismay in all directions. The 
character of some of these hovels defies description. I not long 
since found a widow, whose three children were in fever, occupying 
the piggery of their former cabin, which lay beside them in ruins ; 
however incredible it may appear, this place where they had lived for 
weeks, measured five feet by four feet, and of corresponding height. 
I offered her a free conveyance to the workhouse, which she steadily 
refused ; her piggery was knocked down as soon as her children 
were able to crawl out on recovery ; and she has now gone forth a 
wanderer. I could not induce any neighbour to take her in, even 
for payment ; she had medical aid, and all necessary relief from the 
union. 1 

August 13, 1848. — I regret to say that these monster evictions still 
continue. During the last week forty- four families were evicted, and 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, pp. 7, 8. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 87 

the houses levelled, on one property. ... A band of paupers, taken 
from some distant stone-breaking depots, and armed with spades, 
crowbars, and pickaxes, completed this work of destruction. . . . 
These helpless creatures, not only unhoused but driveti off the lands, 
no one remaining on the lands being allowed to lodge or harbour 
them. . . . When winter sets in these evicted destitute will be in 
awful plight, as their temporary sheds, behind ditches or old fences, 
are quite unfit for human habitation, and if they attempted to build 
anything permanent they would be immediately abolished. If the 
records of the sheriffs office connected with the union for the last 
nine months were produced, they would account for much of the 
death and destitution of the union. 1 

August 25, 1848. — In reply to your communication of the 24th 
instant, I have the honour to inform you that the band of paupers 
therein adverted to were hired by the sub-agent and taken away 
from the stone-breaking depot for the purposes I have stated. 
They, of course, received no relief for the day they were absent, nor 
for some days after, as the relieving officer ascertained that they re- 
ceived a high rate of wages for this service. I did not intend to convey 
that the implements used by these paupers were union or public 
property. 2 

August 27, 1848. — Numerous evictions have taken place during 
the last week : the number and particulars will be forwarded on an 
early day. The ultimate fate of this class is a matter of curious 
speculation when their utter destitution and helplessness are fully 
understood. 3 

Extract from the Vice-Guardians' Report. 

October 21, 1848. — The number of houses now thrown down, and 
of families thereby rendered totally destitute, is daily increasing to a 
fearful extent. 4 

Extract from Report of Captain Kennedy. 

November 7, 1848. — I cannot lead the Commissioners to expect 
other than a rapid increase of numbers becoming chargeable to the 
rates, and it cannot under existing circumstances be otherwise. The 
•extent of destitution which I anticipate, and which exists in the 
union, may be readily accounted for. Large numbers are employed 
during the summer cutting and saving turf, but at a scale of remu- 
neration barely sufficient to support existence. Many more earn a 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 19. 

2 lb. p. 20. 3 lb. p. 23. 4 lb. p. 30, 



88 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

precarious livelihood by fishing in the summer months, but in the 
winter they cannot venture out with their wretched boats and tackle 
on this iron-bound coast The money spent by summer visitors is 
also wanting. To these must be added all those small landholders 
who have been since last spring evicted. I believe that this class 
alone numbers 9,000 souls, and that 8,000 of these are without even 
shelter, as an eviction seldom occurs without the demolition of the 
house. They are swarming over the union in temporary sheds and 
huts which are unfit for human occupation, and from which they are 
daily driven by the inclement weather. 1 

Extract from Report of Captain Kennedy. 

Deceinber 4, 1848. — My acquaintance with the state of this union 
does not allow me to believe that the numbers becoming chargeable 
to the rates will stop short of 20,000. This can hardly be a matter 
of surprise when I state (what the Commissioners are in possession 
of) that I have forwarded returns of the eviction of 6,090 souls since 
last July. 2 

Extract from Report of Captain Kennedy. 

January 22, 1849. — I cannot estimate the evictions in the union 
much under 150 souls per week. 3 . . . The destitution in this union 
is a mighty and fearful reality ; it is in vain to strive to falsify or 
forget its existence ; yet no combined effort, and hardly an individual 
one, is made to alleviate or arrest it. A few philanthropic individuals 
continue to afford their unit of relief and employment, but their 
example is not taking. There is a general lack of energy ; the better 
part of the community seem, for the most part, as apathetic as if the 
country were comparatively prosperous ; while demoralisation, disease, 
and death are spreading like a cancer. I see the masses of the 
people starving, and the land, which could be made to feed treble 
the number, lying all but waste. 4 

Extract of Report from the Vice-Guardians. 

January 22, 1849. — Evictions and throwing down houses con- 
tinue to be carried on to large extent, and the quarter sessions, now 
going on, shows that a large number of ejectments are in process ; 
and we know that within a fortnight upwards of 800 beings have 
been evicted from their houses. We cannot, therefore, make any 
calculation that may come near the amount, but are of opinion that 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 32. 

" lb. p. 36. 3 lb. p. 43. * lb. p. 45- 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 89 

at least 2,000 persons will be added in some parts of the intermediate 
season ; and that about the same number will be off the list in the 
months of April to June ; they increase from that to October. 1 

Extract from Report of Captain Kennedy. 

April 3, 1849. — On one farm alone, in Kilmurry (the most 
miserable district in the union), where there were 73 houses within 
the last ten months, there are now but thirteen. I also enclose a 
petition, marked ' E,' being one of hundreds which I have received to 
the same purport. This houseless class becomes more embarrassing 
daily, and I fear a money allowance for lodging, in addition to food, 
will ere long be forced upon the Vice-Guardians. 2 

The following is the petition : — 

' The humble petition of Patt Litmane 
' Sheweth, 

' That he has neither house nor home, nor place to shelter him ; 
no person would admit him, or give him a night's lodging. He has 
five in family, exposed to all sorts of persecution ; therefore he applies 
to the Board of Guardians to admit him and family into the work- 
house to shelter them. 

' He was upon outdoor relief, and had no asylum to eat it.' 3 

Extract from Report of Captain Kennedy. 

May 7, 1849. — I find that my constant and untiring exertions make 
but little impression upon the mass of fearful suffering. As soon as one 
horde of houseless and all but naked paupers are dead, or provided for 
in the workhouse, another wholesale eviction doubles the number, who, 
in their turn, pass through the same ordeal of wandering from house 
or burrowing in bogs or behind ditches, till, broken down by privation 
and exposure to the elements, they seek the workhouse, or die by 
the roadside. The state of some districts of the union during the 
last fourteen days baffles description ; sixteen houses, containing 
twenty-one families, have been levelled in one small village in 
Killard division, and a vast number in the rural parts of it. As 
cabins become fewer, lodgings, however miserable, become more 
difficult to obtain. And the helpless and houseless creatures, thus 
turned out of the only home they ever knew, betake themselves to 
the nearest bog or ditch, with their little all, and, thus huddled to- 
gether, disease soon decimates them. 

Notwithstanding that fearful, and (I believe) unparalleled numbers 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 45. - lb. 43. s lb. p. 46. 



90 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

have been unhoused in this union within the year (probably 15,000), 
it seems hardly credible that 1,200 more have had their dwellings 
levelled within a fortnight. 

I have a list of 760 completed, and of above "400 in preparation. 
It appears to me almost impossible to successfully meet such a state 
of things ; and the prevailing epidemic, or the dread of it, aggravates 
the evil. None of this houseless class can now find admittance, save 
into some overcrowded cabin, whose inmates seldom survive a month. 
I have shown Dr. Phelan some of these miserable nests of pestilence, 
which I am at a loss to describe. 

Five families, numbering twenty souls, are not unfrequently found 
in a cabin consisting of one small apartment. At Doonbeg, a few 
days since, I found three families, numbering sixteen persons, one of 
whom had cholera, and three in a hopeless stage of dysentery. The 
cabin they occupied consisted of one wretched apartment about 
twelve feet square. It was one of the few refuges for the evicted, 
and they were unable to reckon how many had been carried out of 
it from time to time to the grave.' x 

There are one or two further extracts which illustrate 
very forcibly the working of the land system. Thus, the 
following extracts from Captain Kennedy's report show the 
manner in which the excessive competition for land brought 
up prices far beyond their value and far beyond the capacity 
of the tenant to pay : — 

Hundreds of instances occur where an acre of land worth 155-. is 
let for 3/., and the occupier, in default of full payment, bound to give 
140 days' labour to his lessor during spring and harvest, when the 
occupier himself requires them most ; this would (valuing his labour 
at 8d. per day) amount to 4/. 13s. 2 

The farmer, oppressed himself, naturally acted in like 
manner with regard to the labourer : — 

The same system obtains as to the letting of cabins ; 100 or 120 
days' labour, during the only period the wretched labourer would 
earn, is exacted for a cabin worth perhaps 7s. 6d. a year. 

The occupiers, having thus pauperised the labouring class, get 
their work done for nothing, and complain of rates. I think I could 
show that the sum required to keep the paupers in this union would, 

' Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 46. 2 lb. p. 4. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 91 

if expended in labour, keep the people and pay 20 per cent. 
Employment or wages there is none. 

The farmers and occupiers in the neighbourhood take advantage 
of these occurrences, set their labour done in exchange for food 
alone to the member of the family he employs, till absolute starva- 
tion brings the mother and helpless children to the workhouse. 
This is the history of hundreds. 1 

I can, even in the neighbourhood of a town, procure the services 
of a good able-bodied labourer for his food alone. 2 

And here is a definition of an able-bodied labourer that 
suggests curious reflections : — 

. . . There are but few who realise any idea of an able-bodied 
labourer ; the great mass of them are called so, more in relation to 
their years than their physical power, or in contradistinction to 
those who are in the last stage of disease or existence. Men are called 
able-bodied here who would not be so designated elsewhere. 3 

Then, as to the action of the landlord, here are two ex- 
tracts which give a curious idea of his feelings and conduct : — 

The lands have been already literally swept for rent. I fre- 
quently travel fifteen miles without seeing five stacks of grain of any 
kind ; all threshed and sold. Rent has seldom or ever been looked 
for more sharply, and levied more unsparingly, than this year. 4 

Of the proprietors there are but few resident. I cannot speak of 
their means ; I only know that there has not been any amount of 
poor rate levied in this union seriously to injure them ; no more 
than any man of common humanity ought voluntarily to bestow in 
disastrous times. That they are, generally speaking, embarrassed, I 
fear is a melancholy truth, and goes far to account for the existing 
want of employment and consequent destitution. 5 

The result of these wholesale clearances was to extort 
from Parliament an Act which compelled the landlord to 
give forty-eight hours notice to the Poor Law guardians of 
his district, so that they might be able to make provision for 
giving food and shelter to those whom his eviction had left 
starving and homeless. The Act was called ' An Act for the 
protection and relief of the destitute poor evicted 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Jvilrush Union, 1849, p. 5. 2 lb. p. 36. 

3 lb p, 44. * lb. * lb. pp. 44, 45. 



92 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

dwellings in Ireland.' There is no Act of the Legislature 
which throws so ghastly a light on the social condition of 
Ireland. The first section enacts that notice of an eviction 
must be given forty-eight hours before to the relieving 
officers, and prohibits evictions two hours before sunset or 
sunrise, and on Christmas Day and Good Friday ! The 
seventh section made the pulling down, demolition, or un- 
roofing of the house of a tenant about to be evicted a mis- 
demeanour. The fact that such an Act could be passed 
through two Houses of Parliament in either of which the 
landlord interest was predominant is the strongest evidence 
of the dread condition of things then existing in Ireland. 
But even the merciful provisions of this extraordinary Act, 
small as they were, the landlords and their agents managed 
to evade. The correspondence between Captain Kennedy 
and the Poor Law Commissioners abounds with instances of 
inquiries with regard to the violation of .the law in this respect. 
But the landlords ultimately found out the way in which the 
Act might be evaded, as will be seen from the following 
extract from the Vice-Guardians' Report, dated October 21, 
1848 :— 

In most instances, the plan adopted by the landlords has been to 
proceed by civil bill against the person of the tenant, and, on his 
being arrested, to discharge him from gaol on his having the house 
thrown down, and possession given to landlord by the remainder of 
his family, or by his friends ; in other cases, a small sum is given to 
the tenant, and discharge from all claim of rent, on the house being 
thrown down and possession given up. In both these cases, the 
landlord is not obliged to give notice ; nor does he incur any penalty, 
as no ejectment or legal process has been instituted for the recovery 
of the lands and premises, and the object intended by the Act, ' to 
allow preparation to be made for the reception or subsistence of the 
families,' is totally defeated. 1 

As Captain Kennedy observed 2 : — 

It may be asked why the occupier submits to what is illegal ? 
The answer is, simply, that the great mass are tenants-at-will, and 
dare not resist ; and on many properties notice to quit is served 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 30. 2 lb. p. 5. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 93 

every six months, to enable the lessor to turn out the occupiers when 
he pleases. This is a ruinous system, and one much complained of. 

An extract from the report of Mr. Phelan, one of the Poor 
Law officials, dated May 16, 1849, shows even more plainly 
than do the many extracts from Captain Kennedy that it was 
eviction rather than famine and fever which was accountable 
for this horrible state of the people. He says : — 

I have, in many of the western and southern unions, seen sights 
of the most harrowing description, but I do not think that I have 
ever seen so much wretchedness arising from destitution as in these 
places in 1 847-48. Epidemic fever and dysentery, produced, it is true, 
in considerable measure by want, caused great misery ; but here, in 
the absence of fever and of dysentery, except that arising from want 
of food, destitution, although endeavoured to be met by indoor and 
outdoor relief, has assumed a shape which even in Clifden was not, 
I think, presented. Families are here literally naked, and at the same 
time progressing surely and quickly to the grave by diarrhoea and 
dropsy. x 

Extract from Report of Captain Kennedy. 

May 7, 1849. — In a cow-shed adjoining this wretched cabin, I 
found ' Ellen Lynch ' lying in an almost hopeless stage of dysentery. 
She had been carried thither by her son when ' thrown out ' of her 
miserable lodging, and was threatened with momentary expulsion from 
even this refuge by the philanthropic owner of it; her only safety 
rested in the fears of all but her son to approach her. I was ankle- 
deep in manure while standing beside her. This poor woman is 
nearly related to an elective member of the Ennis Board of Guardians, 
and also to one of the late Kilrush Board. Her husband had been 
lately evicted and died. I had all conveyed to the workhouse. They 
were all in receipt of out-relief, and had even got medical assistance. 

While inspecting a stone-breaking depot a few days since, I observed 
one of the men take off his remnant of a pair of shoes and started 
across the fields; I followed him with my eye, and at a distance saw 
the blaze of a fire in the bog. I sent a boy to inquire the cause of 
it, and the man running from his work, and was told that his house 
had been levelled the day before, that he had erected a temporary 
hut on the lands, and while his wife and children were gathering shell- 
fish on the strand, and he stone-breaking, the bailiff or 'driver' fired 

1 Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 47. 



94 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

it. These ruthless acts of barbarity are submitted to with an unre- 
sisting patience hardly credible. 1 

Extract from Mr. Phelan's Report. 

May 1 6, 1849. — . . . Many of these wretched creatures have 
not the benefit of a one-roomed house, nor even of a hut. I felt it 
my duty to go into several temporary shelters got up on the road- 
side, in fields and in bogs, which shelters were merely a few hurdles 
thrown across from the ground to the ditch or wall, with some loose 
straw or rushes or scraws laid on. These places can only be entered 
on hands and knees; the utmost height is not above three feet, even 
a boy or girl cannot stand up in them; yet I found a family of four 
or five in these places, usually all or most sick. But in some I have 
found the children naked in bed, the mother gone for the 'relief,' and 
the father 'stone-breaking.' 2 

In order to make the picture complete, I will give some 
few names from the nominal lists of the evicted which 
Captain Kennedy was in the habit of appending to his re- 
ports, with the observations made upon them. (Pp. 95-100). 

Such is the picture of Irish landlordism drawn by the pen 
of a Crown official in the days of Ireland's supreme agony. , 

And now for the second part of the inquiry. What were 
the Government doing ? They were not ignorant of what 
was going on in Ireland. If official reports could have spared 
the country any misery, there were enough reports to have 
defeated the worst efforts of famine ; and Parliament, besides, 
was being constantly reminded by debates of what was going 
on. The great clearances were the subject of constant and 
persistent discussion, and Sir Robert Peel was far more 
energetic than Lord John Russell or any of the other Liberal 
Ministers in denouncing their cruelty. The reports of Cap- 
tain Kennedy, from which extracts have just been given, 
supplied him with material for making a strong speech upon 
these evictions. ' I must say,' he remarked, ' that I do not 
think that the records of any country, civil or barbarous, 
present materials for such a picture as is set forth in the 
statement of Captain Kennedy.' Then the Conservative 

' Blue-book No. 1089 : Reports and Returns relating to Evictions in the 
Kilrush Union, 1849, p. 47. - lb. p. 48. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 



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THE GREAT CLEARANCES 101 

leader takes up some of the instances which stand out in 
relief even in this catalogue of horrors. These are the cases 
of the two children lying asleep on the corpse of their dead 
father while their mother was dying fast of dysentery ; the 
case of Ellen Lynch (Captain Kennedy's report, see ante, 
p. 93) ; and the case of the man who ran away from breaking 
stones when he saw the fire put to the hovel in which he had 
placed his wife and children (Captain Kennedy's report, see 
ante, pp. 93-4). ' Three such tragical instances,' he went on, 
' I do not believe were ever presented either in point of fact, 
or as conjured up even in the imagination of any human 
being.' ' 

It is in a speech of Sir Robert Peel, too, that one finds 
another pf the worst cases of eviction in this period disin- 
terred from the voluminous reports in the Blue-books. It is 
the case of an eviction by a man named Blake — a justice of 
the peace in Galway. Quoting the account given by Major 
McKie — an official employed like Captain Kennedy by the 
Poor Law Commissioners — Sir Robert Peel said : ' It would 
appear from the evidence recorded that the forcible ejectments 
were illegal, that previous notices had not been served, and 
that the ejectments were perpetrated under circumstances of 
great cruelty. The time chosen was for the greater part 
nightfall on the eve of the New Year. The occupiers were 
forced out of their houses with their helpless children, and 
left exposed to the cold on a bleak western shore in a stormy 
winter's night ; that some of the children were sick ; that the 
parents implored that they might not be exposed, and their 
houses left till morning ; that their prayers for mercy were in 
vain, and that many of them have since died. " I have visited 
the ruins of these huts (not at any great distance from Mr. 
Blake's residence) ; I found that many of the unfortunate 
people were still living within the ruins of these huts, en- 
deavouring to shelter themselves under a few sticks and sods, 
all in the most wretched state of destitution ; many were so 
weak that they could scarcely stand when giving their evi- 
dence. The site of these ruins is a rocky wild spot fit for 
nothing but a sheep-walk." ' 2 

1 Hansard, June 8, 1849. 3 lb. 



io2 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

It will be seen from these extracts that Parliament was 
perfectly familiar with the horrible intensity of the problem 
that demanded redress ; and again the story is that Parliament 
did nothing, or worse than nothing. 

The expulsion of bankrupt landlords appeared for a time 
to commend itself to the minds of English statesmen as the 
one remedy required. This led to the passage of the En- 
cumbered Estates Act in 1848. The object of this Act was 
to enable the estates of landlords to be sold, in spite of the 
elaborate machinery by which the feudal laws of the country 
guarded against alienation. Under the operation of this Act 
some of the most ancient families of Ireland were driven from 
their properties. Here again the land legislation devised by 
the British Parliament proved once more a curse to the land- 
lord as to the tenant. The landlords, forced to sell at a time 
of terrible depression, were unable to get anything like the 
true value of their lands. Then the new race of proprietors 
that were substituted for the old were in rare cases an im- 
provement. They came from the shopkeeper class who had 
amassed money in trade : the class of promoted bourgeois 
does not shine in the history of any race or country, and in 
Ireland it is made by the circumstances of the country, 
political and social, a peculiarly odious generation. The new 
landlords were more insolent than the old, looked on the 
land as purely an investment, almost always signalised their 
advent of possession by an increase of rent, and mercilessly 
evicted when the tenant at last found the struggle between 
hunger and the rack-rent unequal. To the class of new pro- 
prietors, too, we owe many of the place-hunting generation of 
politicians — the meanest, most unscrupulous, and most pesti- 
lent race of politicians that ever shamed or cursed a race. 

Finally the main object of the Encumbered Estates Act, 
and of much other legislation of the period, was the introduc- 
tion into Ireland of a new element of proprietor. It was one 
of the chief dreams of that period that the Celtic race should 
be replaced by the sturdier and more self-reliant race that 
populated England and Scotland — the assumption being of 
course that it was Irish vice, laziness, and incapacity, and 
not English laws, that caused the hideous breakdown of the 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 103 

English land system in Ireland. The commencement was to 
be made with the landlords. This was one of the objects of 
the Encumbered Estates Act ; and in March 1850, as that 
Act did not seem to fulfil the purpose, another bill was 
introduced for the purpose of establishing land debentures. 
' They had devised a plan,' said the Solicitor-General in 
introducing the measure, c which he hoped would induce 
capitalists from England to take an interest in the sales.' 
And Sir Robert Peel himself took the trouble of elaborating 
in several speeches before the House of Commons a scheme 
for a new plantation of Ireland by the substitution of English 
and Scotch for Irish landlords. 

But it was not the landlords of the Celtic race that were 
to be got rid of ; these the country could very well afford to 
do without ; and possibly a generation of English or Scotch 
landlords would have been incapable of the hideous cruelty 
depicted by Captain Kennedy and so many other writers of 
the times ; it required the training in centuries of unchecked 
racial and religious ascendency, through which the Irish 
land had passed, to inure their hearts to such revolting 
crimes. It was apparently the desire of the English states- 
men of that period to get rid of as many of the peasantry of the 
Celtic race as possible. In these days, when emigration as a 
panacea for all evils is denounced vehemently by so frigid a 
champion of popular rights as Sir William Harcourt, it will 
scarcely be believed that after all the ravages of hunger, the 
decimation through fever, the terrible emigration, it was 
deemed that the true remedy for Ireland was more emigra- 
tion ! Indeed, the unfitness of Ireland for the Irish race and 
the Irish race for Ireland, was a dogma preached with some- 
thing like the fine frenzy of a new revelation in those days. 
' Remove Irishmen,' wrote th£ 'Times' (February 22, 1847), 
' to the banks of the Ganges or the Indus, to Delhi, Benares, 
or Trincomalee, and they would be far more in their element 
there than in a country to which an inexorable fate has con- 
fined them! A select committee of the House of Lords was 
equally catholic in its search for a better land for Irishmen 
than the land which had given them birth. They relate that 
they had taken evidence respecting the state of Ireland — 



io 4 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Where ? the reader will ask. ' In British North American 
colonies (including Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, 
Newfoundland), the West India Islands, New South Wales, 
Port Philip, South Australia, Van Diemen's Land, and New 
Zealand.' And not satisfied with this, they actually apologise 
for not having examined other countries as well. ' The 
committee,' says the Report sorrowfully, ' are fully aware 
that they have as yet examined into many points but super- 
ficially, and that some — as, for example, the state of the 
British possessions in Southern Africa and in the territory of 
Natal — have not yet been considered at all' ' The important 
discoveries of Sir T. Mitchell in Australia have also been but 
slightly noticed,' is added with a final sigh. 

An association consisting of six peers and twelve com- 
moners, styled 'The Irish Committee,' also devoted itself 
very earnestly to the question of emigration. In this Irish 
Committee were two Englishmen — Mr. Godley and Dr. 
Whately — the latter the well-known Archbishop of Dublin. 
Dr. Whately's name is still held in affectionate and respectful 
remembrance ' by many people in England. At this epoch, 
and, as will be seen, still more in a subsequent epoch of Irish 
history, his counsels were among the most fatal to the pro- 
sperity of Ireland. This body drew out an elaborate scheme 
under which a million and a half of the Irish people were to 
be sent to Canada at a cost of 9,000,000/., which was to be 
levied in the shape of an income tax. 

But all this time the idea never occurred to any of the 
English leaders that there should be the slightest interference 
with the power of the landlords. The power of the landlords 
had been the main cause of the horrors through which 
Ireland was passing ; and yet the landlords were to be left 
that power. The mass of the people were to be exported to 
Canada or Australia, to Natal or Van Diemen's land — and 
the country was to be delivered entirely to their lords and 
masters. The land of Ireland was to be laid waste of as 
many of six millions of people as ten thousand landlords 
chose to condemn to banishment. Such was the theory of 
the time. 

The Imperial Parliament continued to act as it had done 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 105 

ever since the Union. Its neglect of remedial legislation had 
rendered the famine inevitable ; the famine had come, and 
the neglect went on just the same as before. Lord John 
Russell, as has been seen, had come into office in July 1846, 
and naturally there were hopes then, as there had often been 
before, that the accession of a Liberal Minister would have 
brought in its train Liberal measures. 

At this point it will be instructive to pause for a moment, 
and consider the action not only of the Imperial Parliament 
party but of the Liberal leaders in particular. Lord John 
Russell, as has been seen, had got into office on the rejection 
of an Irish Coercion Bill. He had objected to the Coercion 
Bill of Sir Robert Peel not merely on account of the harshness 
of its provisions, the weakness of the case in its favour, the 
sufficiency of the ordinary law ; his chief ground of objection 
was that Ireland was in crying need of remedial legislation, 
and that no Coercion Bill ought to be considered by Parlia- 
ment unless it was accompanied, and accompanied even stage 
by stage, by remedial proposals. His reference to the ills of 
Ireland were pitched in as high a key as even the most 
vehement of Irish repealers could have wished. He had 
recapitulated the well-worn evidence before the multitudinous 
committees which in drear succession had inquired into the 
Irish problem, and then he went on : — 

We have here the best evidence that can be procured — the evidence 
... of magistrates for many years, of farmers, of those who have 
been employed by the Crown— and all tell you that the possession of 
land is that which makes the difference between existing and starving 
amongst the peasantry, and that therefore ejections out of their 
holdings are the cause of violence and crime in Ireland. In fact, it 
is no other than the cause which the Great Master of human nature 
describes when he makes a tempter suggest it as a reason to violate 
the law. 

Then he quoted Romeo's address to the Apothecary, and 
went on : — 

Such is* the incentive which is given to the poor Irish peasant to 
break the law, which he considers deprives him of the means, not of 
being rich, but of the means of obtaining a subsistence. On this 
ground, I say, then, if you were right to introduce any measure to 



106 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

repress crime beyond the ordinary powers of the law, it would have 
been right at the same time to introduce other measures by which the 
means of subsistence might be increased, and by which the land upon 
which alone the Irish peasant subsists, might be brought more within 
his reach, and other mode of occupation allowed to him more than 
he now possesses. 1 

So strong was Lord John Russell in this demand for the 
accompaniment of coercive by remedial legislation that he even 
wanted that the two classes of measures should go on side by- 
side, stage by stage — either both or none should be accepted 
by Parliament. 

I know (he said), indeed, the noble lord (the Earl of Lincoln) 
has introduced within the last two or three days measures upon a very 
complicated subject, — the law of landlord and tenant ; but I think 
those measures should have been introduced at the same time with the 
measure now before the House. How is it possible for this House, 
upon such a subject, to be able to tell, from the noble lord's enumera- 
tion of them, whether upon such a delicate subject such measures are 
sufficient? 2 

And shortly afterwards he declared that, while he opposed 
the measure, the state of crime did not supply ' sufficient 
ground for passing a measure of extraordinary severity.' The 
reason, ' above all,' of his hostility was that the Coercion Bill 
had ' not been accompanied . . . with such measures of relief, 
of remedy, and conciliation, affecting the great mass of the 
people of Ireland, who are in distress, as ought to accompany 
anymeasure tending to increased rigour of the law! 3 

And then he sketched the measures by which the con- 
dition of the peasantry might be relieved. He proposed a 
grant for the reclamation of waste lands, and he proposed a 
Bill for ' securing at the same time the lives and properties of 
those who reside on the land ' ; in other words, a scheme of 
tenant right. If such measures were not proposed promptly, 
there might come ' a dreadful outbreak, when, indeed, you 
will hastily resort to measures of remedy and conciliation, 
but which measures will lose half their practical effect and 
almost all their moral effect' 5 

1 Hansard, lxxxvii. pp. 507-8. 2 lb. p. 508. 3 lb. p. 510. 

4 lb. p. 514- s lb. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 107 

And this remarkable speech wound up with an exhor- 
tation in favour of making the Union acceptable to Irish- 
men, by proving that the Imperial Legislature was as anxious 
as a native parliament could be to remedy the grievances of 
Ireland. 1 

Again in 1847, while the stress of the famine made the 
neglect of Irish reform too shameful a thing for even the 
British Parliament to stomach, Lord John Russell was strongly 
in favour of reform. In the speech at the beginning of the 
session, in which he proposed the Soup Kitchen Act, he de- 
clared that there was urgent necessity for some permanent 
alteration in the land laws. The miseries of Ireland, he laid 
down in the most emphatic language, were not due to the 
character of the soil. 

' There is no doubt,' exclaimed Lord John Russell, ' of 
the fertility of the land ; that fertility has been the theme of 
admiration with writers 2 and travellers of all nations.' 

He was equally emphatic in denying that these miseries 
were due to the character of the people. 

' There is no doubt either, I must say, of the strength and 
industry of the inhabitants. The man who is loitering idly 
by the mountain-side in Tipperary or in Derry, whose potato- 
plot has furnished him merely with occupation for a few 
days in the year, whose wages and whose pig have enabled 
him to pay his rent and eke out afterwards a miserable sub- 
sistence — that man, I say, may have a brother in Liverpool, 
or Glasgow, or London, who by the sweat of his brow, from 
morning to night, is competing with the strongest and steadiest 
labourer of England and Scotland, and is earning wages 
equal to any of them. 

' I do not, sir, therefore think,' wound up Lord John 

1 ' If you wish to maintain the Union — if you wish to improve the Union, to 
make the Union a source of happiness, a source of increased rights, a source 
of blessing to Ireland as well as England, a source of increased strength to the 
United Empire, I eware lest you in any way weaken the link which connects 
the two countries. Do not let the people of Ireland believe that you have 
no sympathy with their afflictions, no care for their wrongs, that you are intent 
only upon other measures in which they have no interest.' — Han. ard, lxxxvii. 
p. 516. 

2 Quoted in O'Rourke, p. 322. 



io8 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Russell emphatically, ' that either the fertility of the soil of 
Ireland or the strength and industry of its inhabitants is at 
fault' l 

Earl Grey, another eminent Whig, was equally outspoken 
in his declarations. Like Lord John Russell, he had declared 
against coercion unaccompanied by remedial measures. He 
enumerated that long list of Coercion Acts which I have 
already set forth 2 winding up with the Insurrection Act, 
massed in 1833, renewed in 1834, and but five years expired. 
And again,' he said, ' in 1846, we are called on to renew it. 
We must look further,' continued his lordship ; ' we must look 
to the root of the evil ; the state of the law and the habits of 
the people, in respect to the occupation of the land, are almost 
at the roots of the disorder ; it was undeniable that the clear- 
ance system prevailed to a great extent in Ireland ; and that 
such things could take place, he cared not how large a popula- 
tion might be suffered to grow up in a particular district, was 
a disgrace to a civilised country.' 3 

In 1848 the famine had not passed away. As has been 
seen, the succeeding year was the very worst in the century, 
except 1847. But the British people and the Imperial Par- 
liament had by this time grown accustomed to the deaths of 
thousands by starvation and plague in Ireland as a thing of 
little meaning, though the sound was strong, and Lord John 
Russell entirely changed his tune. He met every demand 
for reform with an uncompromising negative. The Irish 
tenants had no grievances to speak of — self-reliance, industry, 
that is what they should rely on. 

While (said Lord John Russell) I admit that, with respect to the 
franchise and other subjects, the people of Ireland may have just 
grounds of complaint, I, nevertheless, totally deny that their griev- 
ances are any sufficient reason why they should not make very great 
progress in wealth and prosperity, if, using the intelligence which they 
possess in a remarkable degree, they would fix their minds on the 
advantages which they might enjoy rather than upon the evils which 
they suppose themselves to suffer under. 4 

Then he made allusion to a Bill which had been brought 

1 Quoted in O'Rourke, p. 322. 2 See ante. 

3 Quoted in Mitchel, ii. p. 228. 4 Hansard, C, p. 943. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 109 

in by Sir William Somerville, the Chief Secretary, for dealing 
with the Land question. Its proposals were indeed modest. 
It gave compensation to tenants for permanent improve- 
ments ; but those improvements had to be made with the 
consent of the landlords, and it was not proposed that 
the Bill should be retrospective. 

But modest as these proposals were, it did not gain the 
full approval of the Prime Minister, and they did not secure 
the safety of the Bill. ' I have yielded my own conviction/ 
said Lord John Russell, ' to what appears to be the universal 
opinion. I think we have gone as far as we can with respect 
to that subject' But whether the Premier had gone far 
enough or not did not much matter ; for ' there will not,' said 
he, 4 be time to pass it during the present session, and there- 
fore it will be postponed.' 1 

To any such proposal as fixity of tenure the Liberal Prime 
Minister could offer his strongest hostility. ' The Tenant 
Right advocated by the honourable member ' — Mr. Sharman 
Crawford, who had introduced a motion calling for the redress 
of the grievances of the Irish tenantry — ' would amount to this, 
that the tenant in possession has a right to the occupation of 
the land provided he pay his rent punctually. Can anything 
be more completely subversive of the rights of property. . . . ? 
It is impossible for the Legislature, with any regard for justice, 
to pass such a law ; and if such a law were passed for Ireland, 
it would strike at the root of property in the whole United 
Kingdom.' 

And, finally, he concluded with this proposal for the solu ■ 
tion of the great Irish Land problem : — 

But, after all (said Lord John Russell), that which we should look 
to for improving the relations between landlord and tenant is a better 
mutual understanding between those who occupy those relative 
positions. Voluntary agreements between landlords and tenants, 
carried out for the benefit of both, are, after all, a better means of 
improving the land of Ireland than any legislative measure which can 
be passed. 2 

The 'better mutual understanding' on which the Prime 

1 Hansard, C, p. 945. 2 lb. p. 945. 



no THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Minister relied for an improvement in the relations of land- 
lord and tenant at this moment was hounding the landlords 
to carry on those wholesale clearances which have been 
described in the words of Sir Robert Peel and Captain 
Kennedy; which, in the opinion of Earl Grey, were 'a dis- 
grace to a civilised country ' ; which had been denounced 
over and over again by Lord John Russell himself; and 
which, in the opinion of most men, remain as one of the 
blackest records in all history of man's inhumanity to man. 
In the year following the exhortation of the Prime Minister 
to voluntary agreements ' for the benefit of both,' the landlords 
had evicted, according to some authorities, no less than half a 
million of tenants from their estates. 

As the Ministers were opposed to any land legislation, 
no success naturally attended the efforts of private members 
to deal with the question. 

Two other facts must also be recollected in connection with 
this period. The final split between Young Ireland and 
O'Connell was precipitated, it will be remembered, by the 
attitude which O'Connell insisted on taking up towards the 
Whig ministry. The Young Irelanders maintained that the 
Irish party should hold towards Russell the same independent 
attitude as had been taken up towards the Tory ministry of 
Peel, that the repeal agitation should be continued, and that 
the nominees of the Whig ministry, like Sheil, should meet 
the same opposition as all other opponents of repeal and 
all other British office-holders. O'Connell's main argument 
against these demands of the Young Irelanders were the good 
intentions and the promises of Lord John Russell ; and he 
over and over again asserted that the Whig ministry would 
pass measures of reform for Ireland, among others, of course, 
a Bill of Tenant Right. The Young Irelanders would not 
place the same faith in Whig promises as O'Connell, the 
organisation was broken up, O'Connell's power was de- 
stroyed, the Irish people were divided and impotent in face 
of the most awful crisis in their history, and O'Connell died 
of a broken heart. And here was Lord John Russell, on 
whom O'Connell had placed his reliance, to whose good faith 
O'Connell sacrificed his party and himself and his country, 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES tu 

justifying the very worst predictions of the Young Icelanders, 
wrecking the hopes and blasting the lives of the Irish nation. 
It is the second great occasion, described in these pages, of 
an Irish leader placing confidence in a Liberal minister. In 
each case the result was exactly the same ; the trust was 
betrayed, openly, shamelessly, heartlessly. Further instances 
will be found in the following pages where the Irish people; 
untaught by their experiences, again placed their faith in the 
Whig party, and again found that they relied on a rotten 
reed. 

Furthermore, it will be remembered that the great point 
of dispute between the Young Irelanders and John O'Connell 
in the General Election of 1847 was whether the Irish party 
should consist of men pledged to accept no office from a 
British minister, and bound to a policy of independence alike 
of Whig and Tory. John O'Connell maintained that such a 
pledge was unnecessary, and succeeded in defeating the 
Young Irelanders hip and thigh. The fruit was now showing 
itself. The Whig minister was able to answer with flouts 
and jibes and sneers to every demand for justice, for he had 
nothing to fear from a part)' of beggars and adventurers who 
daily besieged his doors with petitions for themselves or their 
friends. This is the fact that explains the brutal and shame- 
ful tergiversation of the British Premier, that lies at the 
foundation of the rejection of all the Irish demands for a 
redress of the grievances that had already shorn the nation 
of two millions and a half of her people, and that in the next 
decade was to reduce the population by still another million. 
Faith in Whig promises — a dependent Irish party — these 
were the chief parents of these disasters. 

Let us continue the dreary chapter of Land proposals in 
the House of Commons. 

On February 25, 1847, Mr. Sharman Crawford brought in 
a Bill proposing to extend to the rest of Ireland the tenant- 
right custom which existed in Ulster. So little did the 
Ministers think of the importance of this proposal that not a 
single member of the Cabinet was present when the Bill was 
proposed ; and after the debate had been adjourned, it was 
rejected by the decisive majority of 112 to 25. In February 



U2 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

1848, Sir William Somerville, Chief Secretary for Ireland, 
introduced a Bill dealing with the question. The fate of 
that measure has just been indicated. It was read a second 
time, it was referred to a select committee, and the select 
committee had not time to report before the close of the 
session. In the same year (1848) Mr. Sharman Crawford 
again brought in his Bill. It was denounced by Mr. 
Trelawney, an English member, as a measure of confis- 
cation. Sir William Somerville demolished the suggestion 
of extending the tenure of Ulster to the rest of Ireland by 
the epigram that the Ulster custom was a good custom but a 
bad law ; and the Bill was defeated. On July 23, 1849, Mr. 
Horsman moved an address on the state of Ireland, pointing 
out that that country was now entering on its fourth year of 
famine, and that sixty per cent, of its population were in 
receipt of relief. ' What are the causes which have produced 
such results ? ' asked Mr. Horsman. ' Bad legislation, careless 
legislation, criminal legislation, has been the cause of all the 
disasters we are now deploring.' But bad legislation, careless 
legislation, criminal legislation remained untouched, for the 
debate was followed by no measure. In 1850 Sir William 
Somerville brought in another Bill. It was read a second 
time, it was sent into committee, and then it was no longer 
heard of. On June 10 in the same year Mr. Sharman 
Crawford again brought in his Bill, and again was defeated. 
On April 8, 1851, Sir Henry Barron moved for a committee 
' to inquire into the state of Ireland, and more especially the 
best means for amending the relationships of landlord and 
tenant' But Lord John Russell would hear nothing of such 
a resolution. If the law of landlord and tenant needed 
amendment, said the Liberal Prime Minister, the proper 
course to be taken was for some private member or for the 
Government to bring in a Bill on the subject, not to raise the 
question by way of a resolution of a character so vague. 
And Lord John Russell from that day until he left office 
never brought in a bill himself on the subject, nor supported 
a Bill brought in by a private member. 

The neglect of all reform in the land tenure of Ireland at 
this epoch, as in previous epochs, is made the more remark- . 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 113 

able by its contrast with the action of the Legislature in 
reference to demands upon its attention by the landlords. 
The frightful state of things in 1847 naturally produced a 
considerable amount of disturbance. Many of the tenants 
were indecent enough to object to being robbed of their 
own improvements even with the sanction of an alien 
Parliament, and went the length of revolting against their 
wives and children being massacred wholesale, after the 
fashion described in Captain Kennedy's reports. In short, the 
rent was in danger, and in favour of that sacred institution all 
the resources of British law and British force were promptly 
despatched. The Legislature had shown no hurry whatever 
to meet in '46 or '47 when the question at issue was whether 
hundreds of thousands of the Irish tenantry should perish of 
hunger or of the plague. Parliament came together at the 
usual time in 1846, and at the usual time in the beginning of 
1 847. Now Parliament could not be summoned too soon, and a 
Coercion Bill could not be carried with too much promptitude. 
The Coercion Bill of Lord John Russell and of 1847 was in 
all essentials the Coercion Bill of Sir Robert Peel and 1846. 
There were powers to proclaim districts by the Lord-Lieu- 
tenant, and when a district was proclaimed, everybody was 
obliged to stop within his house from dusk till morning under 
pain of transportation. There were orders for the delivery of 
arms, for the drafting of additional police into districts, and 
for the addition of the burdens thus imposed to the rates 
already payable by the starving tenants. 

The reader will not fail to notice the abject inconsistency 
between the action of Lord John Russell and the other 
Liberal leaders in opposition and in power. It will not be 
necessary to recall the quotations which have just been made 
from the speech of Lord John Russell in opposing the 
Coercion Bill of 1846. Suffice it to say that while in 1846 
he had objected to the Coercion Bill, ' above all ' because it 
was not accompanied with measures ' of relief, of remedy, 
and conciliation,' and that he had gone so far as to pledge 
himself to the principle that some such proposals ought to ac- 
company any measure which tended to ' increased rigour of the 
law,' Lord John Russell was now himself proposing a measure 



ii4 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

for greatly ' increased rigour of the law,' not only without 
accompanying it with any measure of ' relief, of remedy, of 
conciliation' on his own part, but vehemently opposing any 
such measure when brought in by any other person. Lord Grey 
has been quoted for his opinion on the clearance system, and 
here was the clearance system going on worse than ever, and 
Lord Grey remaining a member of the Ministry which through 
Coercion gave that clearance system an enormous impetus. 

The police at the same time were urged to unusual 
activity, and large bodies of the military even were pressed 
into the service of the landlords, seized the produce of the 
fields, carried them to Dublin for sale — acted in every respect 
as the collectors of the rent of the landlord, and thus shared 
with the landlord the honour of starving the tenants. 

A second contrast between the acceptance of remedial 
and coercive legislation by the Imperial Parliament occurred 
in 1848. A number of Irishmen, as has been seen, driven to 
madness by the dreadful suffering they everywhere saw 
around, and by the neglect or incapacity of Parliament, had 
sought the desperate remedy of open revolt. The men who, 
for wrongs much less grievous, rose in the same year in 
Hungary or France or Italy were the idols of the British 
people, and were aided and encouraged by British statesmen. 
Their action towards Ireland was to pass a brand-new Treason 
Felony Act, and to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act. The 
circumstances under which the Habeas Corpus Act was 
suspended are very instructive. 

'The next day, although, being Saturday, it was out of course 
for the House of Commons to sit,' says the 'Annual Register,' ' 
Parliament came together. Lord John Russell brought forward 
his Bill. Sir Robert Peel at once ' gave his cordial support to 
the proposed measure.' 2 Mr, Disraeli ' declared his intention 
of giving the measure of government his unvarying and un- 
equivocal support.' 3 Mr. Hume was 'obliged, though reluc- 
tantly, to give his consent to the measure of the Government.' 4 
And when the division came, there were for the amendment 
against the Bill proposed by Mr. Sharman Crawford 8 votes, 
and for the first reading of the Bill 27 1. 5 But this was only 

1 Annual Register for 1848, p. 100. - lb. p. 102. 

3 lb. p. 105. 4 lb. p. 106. 5 lb. p. 107. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 115 

the beginning of the good day's work. Lord John Russell 
said that, ' as the House had expressed so unequivocally its 
feeling in favour of the Bill, it would doubtless permit its 
further stages to be proceeded with instanter. He moved 
the second reading.' l Of course the House permitted the 
further stages to be proceeded with instanter, and the Bill, 
having passed through Committee, ' Lord Russell moved 
the third reading,' which was agreed to, ' and the Bill was 
forthwith taken up to the House of Lords.' ' On the next day 
but one, Monday, July 26,' goes on the 'Annual Register,' ' the 
Bill was proposed by the Marquis of Lansdowne, who con- 
cluded his speech in its favour by moving " That the public 
safety requires that the Bill should be passed with all possible 
despatch." ' Of course the motion was accepted by their 
Lordships ' that the Bill should be passed with all possible 
despatch.' Lord Brougham ' cordially seconded the motion 
of Lord Lansdowne,' and, as the ' Record ' winds up, ' the Bill 
passed nem. dis. through all its stages.' 

Such was the action of the Imperial Parliament upon the 
Irish question. The reader will not forget that in the year 
up to which I have now brought the story of legislation upon 
the land question, Ireland was perfectly tranquil. The agita- 
tion for Repeal, which had reached such mighty and appar- 
ently resistless proportions in 1843, had vanished amid dissen- 
sions, hunger, fever, emigration, and a vast multitude of 
corpses. The upholders of the Legislative Union were able 
to look abroad on the face of Ireland, and to rejoice that 
sedition, in the shape of the demand for Repeal, and treason, 
in the form of open insurrection, was gone. The Imperial 
Parliament was unchecked mistress of the destinies of Ireland ; 
and this was how it was fulfilling its mission. 

And now, having described the Famine, but two things 
remain to be discussed. Was the Famine inevitable? Or 
was it preventable evil — evil that was created by bad, and 
that could have been prevented by good, government? 

I have sufficiently discussed already the measures which 
were taken by the English Ministers to meet the calamity. 
I think most impartial men will see in the results which 

1 Annual Register for 1848, p. 108 



n6 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

followed these measures a dread condemnation of these 
Ministers. Most persons will hold that a civilised, highly 
organised, and extremely wealthy government ought to be 
able to meet such a crisis so effectually as to prevent the loss 
of one single life by hunger. In the present generation, 
India was menaced by a famine. The Marquis of Salisbury 
was Secretary for India, and public opinion in England 
demanded of him that not one of our Indian fellow-subjects 
should die of hunger ; and not one did die. I have already 
alluded to the language in which some Irish writers are 
accustomed to speak of the action and intentions of the 
Government. Their theory is that the terrors and horrors of 
the Famine were the result of a deliberate conspiracy to 
murder wholesale an inconvenient, troublesome, and hostile 
nation. Such a theory may be rejected, and yet leave a 
heavy load of guilt on the Ministers. In political affairs, we 
have to look not so much to the intentions as to the results 
of policies; and it is undeniable that in 1846 and in 1847, 
there were as many deaths as if the deliberate and wholesale 
murder of the Irish people had been the motive of English 
statesmanship. Statesmen, I say, must be judged by the 
results of their policy. The policy which created the Famine 
was the land legislation of the British Parliament. The 
refusal of the British Legislature to interfere with rack rents ; 
the refusal to protect the improvements of the tenants ; the 
facilities and inducements to wholesale eviction — these were 
the things that produced the Famine of 1846 ; and such 
legislation, again, was the result of the government of Ire- 
land by a Legislature, independent of Irish votes, Irish con- 
stituencies, Irish opinion. 

This must also be said, that the Act of Union, which pro- 
duced the Famine, and then aggravated it to the unsurpassable 
maximum, had also the effect of increasing the existing 
hatred between the English and the Irish nations. While the 
Famine was giving such tragic testimony in favour of the 
Repeal of the Union, and in justification of the agitation of 
the Irish people for Repeal, the movement had left in the 
minds of the English people a strong feeling of antagonism 
to the Irish. Peel declared deliberately in his political 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 117 

memoranda at this period ' that the agitation for Repeal and 
the tribute to O'Connell would seriously interfere with the 
tendency of the English people to come to the assistance of 
Ireland. On the other hand, it is easy to understand how 
the Irish should have been embittered to frenzy when they 
saw the dominant nation, that claimed and had carried its 
superior right to govern, so performing its functions of govern- 
ment that roads throughout Ireland were impassable with the 
gaunt forms of the starving, or the corpses of the starved, 
and that every ship was freighted with thousands fleeing 
from their homes. To this day the traveller in America will 
meet Irishmen who were evicted from Ireland in the great 
clearances of the Famine time, and they speak even to this 
hour with a bitterness as fresh as if the wrong were but of 
yesterday. It was these clearances and the sight of wholesale 
starvation and plague, far more than racial feelings, that pro- 
duced the hatred of English government which strikes impar- 
tial Americans as something like frenzy. It was the events 
of '46 and '47, of '48 and '49, that sowed in Irish breasts 
the feelings that in due time produced eager subscribers to 
the dynamite funds. Yet the English people not only did 
nothing to deserve such hatred, but rather did much to earn 
very different sentiments. ' No one,' writes Justin McCarthy, 
whose feelings in these days, as will be seen, were keen enough 
to make him a rebel, ' could doubt the good will of the 
English people.' 2 Relief societies were formed almost every- 
where. ' The British Association for the Relief of Extreme 
Distress in Ireland, and the Highlands and Islands of Scot- 
land,' collected no less a sum than 263,25 1/. 3 A Queen's 
letter was raised with the same object, and no less than 
171,533/. were collected. I have myself heard an Englishman 
say that he remembered the Famine because, being a child at 
the time, he was not permitted to take butter with his bread 
in order that some money might be saved for the starving 
poor of Ireland. It was, then, not the English people that 
were to blame for the horrors of the Irish Famine, excepting 
so far as they were responsible for their choice of representa- 

1 Memoirs, part iii. 2 History of Our Own Times. 

3 Census Commissioners, quoted from Trevelyan's Irish Crisis, p. 288. 



n8 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



tives, and for the maintenance of English institutions in 
Ireland. It was the British Parliament and the British 
Ministers that worked the wholesale slaughter of Irishmen 
which has produced the murderous hatred of so many of their 
race for England. In other words, the Act of Union is the 
great criminal. It is the government of Ireland by English- 
men and by English opinion that has the double result of ruin- 
ing Ireland and endangering England — of producing much 
undeserved and preventable suffering to Irishmen, and much 
undeserved and preventable trouble and hatred to England. 

The second point that requires discussion is, whether the 
Famine was avoidable or unavoidable. John Mitchel speaks 
of the Famine as an ' artificial ' famine, and other Irish writers 
maintain that, in spite of the loss of the potato, there was 
enough of food produced in Ireland during these very famine 
years to have prevented a single person in the country from 
dying of starvation. I have already made mention of the fact 
that ships were bearing away from the ports of Ireland wheat 
and cattle in abundance : and I have quoted the observation 
of Lord John Russell, pointing to the fact that in the year 1847 
the wheat crop, instead of being under, was above the average. 

We have no trustworthy statistics in reference to the live 
stock and agricultural produce of Ireland in the years 1845 
and 1846 — for it was not till 1847 that means were taken for 
having statistics on this subject collected in a regular manner. 
But we have fairly trustworthy statistics with regard to the 
export of produce in the first of those two years, and also to 
the export of produce and live stock in the second. First 
dealing with the year 1845, the following are the statistics of 
the export of produce for 1845 and the four preceding years : 1 



Year 


Wheat and 

wheaten 

flour* 


Barley 

including 

Bere or 

Bigg 


Oats and 
Oatmeal 


Rye 


Peas 


Beans 


Malt 


Total 


1841 

1842 

1843 
1844 

1845 


qrs. 
218,708 
201,998 
413,466 
440,152 
779,"3 


qrs. 

75,568 

50,297 

1 10,449 

90,656 

93>°95 


qrs. 
2,539,380 
2,261,435 
2,648,032 
2,242,308 

i,3">592 


qrs. 
172 

76 

37* 

264 


qrs. 

855 
1,551 
1,192 
1,091 
2,227 


qrs. 
15,907 
19,831 
24,329 
18,580 
14,668 


qrs. 

4,935 
3,046 
8,643 
8,155 
",329 


qrs. 
2,855,525 
2 538,234 
3,206,482 
2,801,204 
3,251,901 



1 McCulloch, Dictionary of Commerce, latest edition, by A. J. Wilson, p. 450. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 



119 



It will be seen from this that the export of wheat and 
wheaten flour, instead of being diminished in 1845 by the 
blight of the potato and the consequent famine, was enor- 
mously increased. The number of quarters exported in 1845, 
779> II 3> is nearly double that exported in the two preceding 
years, and considerably more than treble that exported in the 
years 1841 and 1842. The export of barley, 93,095 quarters, 
is larger than any of the preceding years except 1843. In 
the oats alone is there any diminution. The grand total is 
nearly 1,000,000 quarters beyond the exports of 1841, 1842, 
and 1844, and is higher than the export of 1843, which was 
the largest of the preceding four years. 1 

The exports of articles of food in 1 846 were : — 



Wheat and wheat flour 

Barley, &c. 

Oats and oatmeal . 

Peas 

Beans 

Malt 

Total - 



Quarters 

393,462 

92,854 

2,227 
14,668 
11,329 

1,826,1322 



Here there is a considerable reduction as compared with, 
the figures of the preceding years, but still there remains a 
total of 1,826,132 quarters of food exported from a starving 
nation. Coming now to the export of live cattle, here are 
the figures for 1 846 : — 

Quarters 

Oxen, bulls, and cows .... 186,483 

Calves . ...... 6,363 

Sheep and lambs . . , . . 259,257 

Swine ..... . 480,827 3 



These figures of exported cattle from Ireland in the midst 
of the horrors of 1 846 make a very formidable total indeed. 



1 Thorn's Almanac for 1848 states that the total imports of Irish produce into 
Liverpool alone, increased from 4,149,428/. in 1842 to 6,383,498/. in 1845. 
2 McCulloch, Diet, of Com. p. 450. 3 lb. 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



Passing on to 1847, we find the exportation of food to be 


as follows : — 


Quarters 


Wheat and wheat flour . . . 184,024 


Barley, &c. 




47,527 


Oats and oatmeal 




703,465 


Rye 




1,498 


Peas 




4,659 


Beans 




22,361 


Malt 




5,956 



Total 



969,490 



This is the total quantity of produce, excluding pota- 
toes ' : — 



Description of Crops 


Extent under Crops 


Quantity of Produce 




Statute acres 


Quarters 


Wheat 


743, 8 7I 


2,926,733 


Oats 


2,200,870 


II,52I,6o6 


Barley ..... 


283,587 


1,379,029 


Bere . . . . 


49,068 


274,016 


Rye 


12,415 


63,094 


Beans ..... 
Total 


23,768 


84,456 


3,313,579 


16,248,934 



The live stock of the year is estimated in the agricultural 
returns as being of the value of 24,820,547/., and Thom cal- 
culates that the value of the stock and agricultural produce 
together amounted to 38,528, 224//* 

In 1848 the agricultural returns of cereal crops were 3 : — 



Description of Crops 


Extent of land under 
Crops 


Quantity of Produce 


Wheat 

Oats 

Barley 

Bere . . 

Rye 

Beans and peas . 


Statute acres 

565,746 

1,922,406 

243,235 

53,058 

21,502 

50,749 


Quarters 

1,555,500 

9.050,490 

1,135,120 

263,415 

105,375 

172,508 



1 Census Commissioners' Report, 1851, p. 281. 

2 Thorn's Almanac, 1848. 

Census Commissioners' Report, 1851, p. 308. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 



Exports of produce in 1848 are : — 


Quarters 
304,873 


Wheat and wheat flour . , . 


Barley 


79 5 88 5 


Oats and oatmeal .... 


• 1,546,568 


Rye 


15 


Peas ...... 


2,572 


Beans ...... 


12,314 


Malt 


6,365 



Total 



i,95 2 ,59 2 



In the same year the value of the live stock is given in 
the official returns as 23,112,51s/. 2 

Official returns give the subjoined figures as to the cereal 
crops in 1 849 : — 3 



Description of Crops 


Extent under Crops 


Quantity of Produce 




Statute acies 


Barrels 


Wheat 


687,646 


3>64I,I98 


Oats 


2,061,185 


15.738,073 


Barley ..... 


290,690 


2,441,176 


Bere ..... 


60,819 


496,037 


Rye 


20,l68 


164,877 


Beans and peas 

Total cereal crops . 


59,916 


1,436,262 bushels 


3,174,424 


2,182,514 tons 

1 



In the same year the value of the live stock was 
2 5,692,6 1 7/. 4 Food produce sent to Great Britain in 1849 
amounted to : — 

Quarters 

Wheat and wheat flour .... 234,680 

Barley 

Oats and oatmeal 

Rye 

Peas 



Beans 

Malt 



Total 



46,400 

1,123,469 

414 

3,369 

32,450 

5,i8i 
i,435,963 5 



1 McCulloch, Did. of Com. p. 450. 

2 The valuation of the live stock is founded on the same estimate of prices as 
in 1841. The returns for 1848 do not include Waterford, Tipperary, and the 
metropolitan district of Dublin, the enquiry in these parts of the country being 
abandoned on account ot the disturbed state of the country. 

3 Census Commissioners' Report, 1851, p. 315. * Id. 
5 McCulloch, Diet, of Com. p. 450. 



122 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

These figures may well be left to tell their own tale. One 
thing necessary to bear in mind in considering the number of 
quarters of foods exported from Ireland is that one quarter of 
wheat is equal to 392 pounds of flour, or to 470 pounds of 
bread, 1 and this has been calculated as about the average 
annual consumption of an individual. It is a simple sum in 
multiplication to find how many daily rations of bread for 
starving peasants were exported in each of these years. 

A second basis of calculation is a comparison between the 
value of the live stock and the agricultural produce in any of 
these years, and the amount of money which was required for 
meeting the distress. The Soup Kitchen Act (Relief Act, 
10 Vict. c. 7) came into operation in March 1847, and ceased 
on September 12, in the same year. Under this Act there 
were in July, 1847, three million, twenty thousand, seven 
hundred and twelve persons who received separate rations in 
one day. We have thus an easy means of calculating what 
the feeding of the people in distress in Ireland would cost for 
these months. The period of distress during which this Act 
operated was the very worst period of the whole cycle of 
years. The number requiring relief then reached the highest 
point, and therefore we have in this sum, spent under this 
Act, a maximum beyond which the numbers depending on 
governmental or public aid ought not to go. The sum, then, 
authorised under this Act was 2,200,000/. ; the sum actually 
spent was 1, 676,268/. 2 : in other words, about a million and a 
half. Put this sum of a million and a half beside some of 
the figures which have just been quoted. It is, for instance, 
one-sixteenth of the value of the live cattle in Ireland in 
this same year of 1847. Taking the value of the cattle, 
sheep, and swine on the figures of 1841, the value of the 
totals exported was 1,988,492/. Thus there was exported 
in cattle, sheep, and swine alone in this year — to say nothing 
whatever of the 969,490 qrs. of cereals — nearly half a 
million more in money value than was required to feed 
three millions of starving people in the same year. Finally, 
a million and a half was the amount spent under the Soup 

1 Thom's Almanac, 1848. 

2 Census Commissioners' Report., pp. 287, 28S. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 123 

Kitchen Act, and the absentee rents alone were five millions 
sterling. 

The position, then, is this. The landlords took from the 
tenants all the produce, ' minus the potatoes, necessary to keep 
them from famine' — to fall back upon the phrase of John 
Stuart Mill. When the potatoes failed, the remainder of the 
produce, instead of being divided between the landlords and 
the tenants, was sent to either home or foreign markets for 
the purpose of paying the rent of the landlords. In other 
words, it was the consumption of food by rent instead of by 
the people that produced the famine. It was, as Mitchel 
calls it, an artificial famine — starvation in the midst of food. 

Meantime a change had come over Ireland which has 
been noted by every writer, either during or since that time. 
Testimony is unanimous as to the sadness and the complete- 
ness of this change. ' Here are twenty miles of country, sir,' 
said a dispensary doctor to me, ' and before the famine there 
was not a padlock from end to end of it. Under the pressure 
of hunger, ravenous creatures prowled around barn and store- 
house, stealing corn, potatoes, cabbage, turnips — anything, in a 
word, that might be eaten. Later on, the fields had to be 
watched, gun in hand, or the seed was rooted up and devoured 
raw. This state of things struck a fatal blow at some of the 
most beautiful traits of Irish life. It destroyed the simple 
confidence that bolted no door ; it banished for ever a custom 
which throughout the island was of almost universal obliga- 
tion — the housing for the night, with cheerful welcome, of 
any poor wayfarer who claimed hospitality. Fear of "the 
fever," even where no apprehension of robbery was enter- 
tained, closed every door, and the custom once killed off has 
not revived. A thousand kindly usages and neighbourly 
courtesies were swept away. When sauve qui pent has re- 
sounded throughout a country for three years of alarm and 
disaster, human nature becomes contracted in its sympathies, 
and " every one for himself " becomes a maxim of life and 
conduct long after. The open-handed, open-hearted ways of 
the rural population have been visibly affected by the " Forty- 
seven ordeal." Their ancient sports and pastimes everywhere 
disappeared, and in many parts of Ireland have never returned. 



124 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The outdoor games, the hurling-match, and the village dance 
are seen no more.' 1 

'The famine,' says Gavan Duffy, 'swallowed things more 
precious than money and money's worth, or even than 
human lives. The temperance reformation, the political 
training of a generation, the self-respect, the purity and gene- 
rosity which distinguished Irish peasants, were sorely wasted. 
Out of the place of the damned, a sight of such piercing woe 
was never seen as a Munster workhouse, with hundreds of 
a once frank and gallant yeomanry turned into sullen beasts, 
wallowing on the floor as thick as human limbs could pack. 
Unless, indeed, it were that other spectacle of the women of 
a district waiting in pauper congregation around the same 
edifice for outdoor relief. New and terrible diseases sprang 
out of this violation of the laws of nature. There was soon a 
workhouse fever, a workhouse dysentery, a workhouse ophthal- 
mia ; and children, it was said, were growing up idiots from 
imperfect nourishment. In eight of the worst poor-law unions, 
the contract coffin left the workhouse seventy times a week with 
the corpse of a human being. The ophthalmia often carried 
with it consequences more painful than death, when it left 
the sufferer unfit to earn his bread any more in the world. 
There were upwards of 2,000 cases of this disease within ten 
months in the Tipperary union, and as many in the Limerick 
union. In Tipperary, Sir William Wilde, one of the Census 
Commissioners, saw eighty-seven patients whose sight was 
permanently damaged, eighteen incurably blind figures, thirty- 
two who had lost one eye. In Connaught, where poverty 
was long the chronic condition of the country, the famine 
had actually created a new race of beggars, bearing only a 
distant and hideous resemblance to humanity. Wherever the 
traveller went in Galway or Mayo, he met troops of wild, 
idle, lunatic-looking paupers wandering over the country. 
Grey-headed old men, with faces settled into a leer of hardened 
mendicancy, and women filthier and more frightful than 
ha 'pies, who at the jingle of a coin on the pavement swarmed 
in myriads from unseen places, struggling, screaming, shriek- 
ing for their prey like monstrous and unclean animals. 

1 A. M. Sullivan's New Ireland, pp. 67, 68. 



THE GREAT CLEARANCES 125 

Beggar-children, beggar-girls, with faces grey and shrivelled, 
met you everywhere ; and women with the more touching 
and tragic aspect of lingering shame and self-respect not yet 
effaced. I saw these accursed sights, and they are burned 
into my memory for ever. Poor, mutilated, and debased 
scions of a tender, brave, and pious stock, they were martyrs 
in the battle of centuries for the right to live in their own 
land, and no Herculaneum or Pompeii covers ruins so memo- 
rable to me as those which lie buried under the fallen roof- 
trees of an " Irish extermination." ' l 

These two pictures from brilliant writers agree with hun- 
dreds of others drawn by Irish pens. It is certain that to- 
day, Ireland is the saddest country in this world of many 
countries and many tears. With the Famine joy died in 
Ireland ; the day of its resurrection has not yet come. 

One word finally. The population of Ireland by March 30, 
185 1, at the same ratio of increase as held in England and 
Wales, would have been 9,018,799 — it was 6,5 5 2,38 $. 2 It was 
the calculation of the Census Commissioners that the deficit, 
independently of the emigration, represented by the mortality 
in the five famine years, was 985, 366, 3 nearly a million of 
people. The greater proportion of this million of deaths 
must be set down to hunger and the epidemics which hunger 
generated. To those who died at home must be added the 
large number of people who, embarking on vessels or landing 
in America or elsewhere with frames weakened by the famine, 
or diseases resulting from the famine, perished in the manner 
already described. Father O'Rourke, 4 calculating these at 
17 per cent, of the emigration of 1,180,409, arrives at the total 
of 200,668 persons who died either on the voyage from their 
country or on their arrival at their destination. This would 
raise the total of deaths caused through the Irish Famine to 
upwards of a million of people. 

1 Extract from Lecture on ' Why is Ireland poor and discontented ? ' delivered 
in the Polytechnic Hall, Melbourne, on February 23, 1870, by the Hon. 
Gavan Duffy, M.P. London: Burns, Oates & Co., and Dublin: James Duffy. 
Printed with ' Is Ireland irreconcilable ?' an article, reprinted from The Dublin 
Review, by John Cashel Hoey. 

2 Census Commissioners' Report, 1851, p. 245. 

3 lb. p. 2^6. 4 lb. p. 499. 



126 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



CHAPTER V. 

THE GREAT BETRAYAL. 

At last it seemed as if the very excess of the evil was about 
to produce its own remedy. The wholesale evictions rilled 
the peasants of the south with a desperate resolve to make 
another attempt for the relief of their position ; and the rack- 
renter in Ulster was gradually working up that province to a 
state of feeling as bitter as that of the southern counties. For 
the Ulster farmer was finding that the Ulster custom gave 
him no security against the increase of his rent, and that 
thus the large amount of capital he invested in the purchase 
of the tenant right of the farm was turning out a disastrous 
investment. In this way the north and south were ripe for a 
new movement in favour of tenant right. The movement 
when started was not long in gaining strength ; the leaders 
in the different parts of the country saw and understood each 
other ; and a combination was made between the tenant-right 
leaders of the north and of the south. 

This union had elements of hope for the future of Ireland 
beyond the mere chance of settling the land question. Every- 
body knows that religious dissensions have been the most 
fruitful cause of that division among the Irish people by which 
their oppressors have been able to conquer and to hold them. 
Here were the Presbyterians of the north standing on the 
same platform as the Catholics of the south — fighting against 
the same relentless enemy, and for the same sacred rights. 
The hopefulness of the spectacle is best proved by the fears 
and condemnation which it received. Religious bigots were 
in a terrible state of alarm, and prophesied woeful things. 
The leader of this odious feeling in the north was a clergyman 
named Doctor Cook, a man of great eloquence and of great 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 127 

force of character, who was for nearly half a century the most 
commanding force in the Presbyterian Church. He was a 
Conservative of the Conservatives, and hated his religious 
opponents with the fervour of the Middle Ages. But the 
demand for tenant right made itself heard even in the con- 
ventions where he was the most prominent and powerful 
figure. For such demands he had nothing but condemna- 
tion. They were Socialism, Communism, and the like, and it 
all came from the original abomination of Presbyterian clergy- 
men associating with the servants of Baal in the shape of the 
Catholic clergymen. 

Nevertheless this unholy alliance went on, gathered 
strength as it proceeded, and might have led to a permanent 
alliance on the basis of common triumphs which would have 
been full of blessings for all the Irish race. The movement 
at last took shape, and a circular was sent around calling for 
a Tenant Right convention. The circular itself was a proof of 
the change that was coming over the times. It was signed 
by three men, among others — all members of different creeds 
— by Dr. (afterwards Sir John) Gray, an Episcopalian Pro- 
testant ; by Dr. MacKnight, a Presbyterian ; and by Mr. 
Frederic Lucas, a Catholic. In obedience to this call an in- 
fluential meeting was assembled on August 6, 1850, in the 
City Assembly House, William Street, Dublin. 

' The sharp Scottish accent of Ulster,' writes A. M. Sulli- 
van, describing the gathering, ' mingled with the broad Doric 
of Munster. Presbyterian ministers greeted Popish priests 
with fraternal fervour. Mr. James Godkin, editor of the 
staunch covenanting " Derry Standard "... sat side by side 
with John Francis Maguire, of the ultramontane " Cork 
Examiner." Magistrates and landlords were there ; while of 
tenant delegates every province sent up a great army.' ' 

It is curious to look back in this year on the proposals 
put forward at this convention. The resolutions practically 
demanded what have since come to be known as the three 
' F's ' — Fixity of Tenure, Free Sale, and Fair Rents. Another 
question which has since been made familiar also came before 
the convention. This was the question of the arrears of rent. 

1 New Ireland, p. 149. 



128 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

It was represented that during the period of famine it was 
perfectly impossible for the tenants to pay any rent, large or 
small ; and that if the landlords chose to insist on their rights 
they could evict the greater part of the whole Irish population. 
Accordingly a resolution was passed to the effect that the 
arrears should be subjected to inspection by a valuator ; that 
he should estimate the amount due on consideration of the 
prices and other circumstances of the famine period ; that he 
should compare the actual amount paid in rent by the tenant 
to the landlord ; and that if there were any balance still due 
on such a comparison, it should be paid to the landlords in 
instalments spread over a certain period. 

To any impartial reader who has read the pages in which 
the story of the famine has been told; this proposal will not 
appear to be very unreasonable ; but the times were not ripe 
for reason on the Irish land question. The arrears of the 
famine period were allowed to continue ; they came to form 
a dread feature of the Irish peasant's life under the name of 
the ' hanging gale ; ' and for thirty-four years the ' hanging 
gale ' was allowed to realise its ill-omened name, leaving the 
fortunes and the lives of nearly a hundred thousand families 
at the absolute mercy of their landlords. 

The movement which was thus initiated took the country 
by storm, and was the first break in the disastrous gloom 
that had overhung everything since the advent of the famine 
and the downfall of O'Connell. Famine had now apparently 
done with the country — at least for an interval ; the cataclysm 
under which the wretched party returned in 1847 had been 
able everywhere to debauch or deceive constituencies and 
drive all public honesty out of the representation of the 
country, was now in the past, and there seemed a chance 
once more for the country, for constitutional agitation, and 
for honest and unselfish public men. Gavan Duffy thought 
the season so promising that he consented to stand for a 
constituency ; and his newspaper wrote of the movement and 
of the coming time in a strain of sanguine expectation, which, 
representing as it did the hopes of the country generally, 
makes darker the tragedy in which these hopes were eclipsed. 

' On as solemn a summons,' writes the ' Nation,' Duffy's 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 129 

paper. ' as ever drew men together in any nation of this earth, 
since the sun first reached her solstice over it, do the delegates 
of the Irish people assemble on next Tuesday. ... In a 
' people beggared, broken, brutalised in some sense, they have 
1 undertaken to inspire the vigour and the comeliness of in- 
dependence. They gird their strength to redeem a fallen 
land to its true place in the zodiac of nations. And, before 
God and man, they are amenable for grievous ignorance of 
the opportunity, and a heavy dereliction of duty, if the next 
week pass unused or misused by them.' 

The most promising feature of the new movement was 
that it put a definite, a single, a great and absorbing issue 
before the country. The farmers formed still the majority of 
the electorate : they were known to be ready to stand by the 
representatives of their interests, in spite of the omnipotence 
still exercised over them by the landlord ; and of course they 
were united to a man in the demand for security for their 
industry and their homes. They had the will and they had 
the power to return a majority of the Irish representatives ; 
and an Irish party has since shown that a body of men, 
earnest and honest, resolute and united, can wring from a 
Ministry a great measure of land reform, without even having 
the majority of the Irish representatives. It is no exaggera- 
tion, then, to say that the Tenant Right movement of 1850 
might have succeeded in all its purposes : might have won 
fixity of tenure and free sale and fair rent, and might have 
saved Ireland a quarter of a century of the darkest and most 
bitter events in her history. 

But it was not to be. The movement that began in such 
hope and with so many promises of complete success ended 
in fiercer, completer, more enduring disaster than any of those 
which had preceded it. Two men were mainly responsible 
for this : the one was a weak and foolish Englishman, the 
other a strong and an evil Irishman. The two men were 
Lord John Russell and William Keogh. 

The conference of the Tenant League took place, as has 
been seen, on August 6,. 1850; in November 4 in the same 
year Lord John Russell published the ' Durham Letter.' 
This was the letter addressed to the Bishop of Durham in 



130 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

which he denounced the movement, howled at in that period 
and laughed at in this, as ' Papal aggression.' The Pope had 
changed the titles of the Catholic archbishops and bishops in 
England and Scotland from titles in partibus into titles 
borrowed from English places. Thus Cardinal Wiseman was 
created Archbishop of Westminster. This innocent step 
called forth a tempest of indignation among the ignorant and 
fanatical in the English population. There rose one of those 
' No Popery ' storms which can always be provoked among 
the English masses, and there was a panic-stricken cry for 
legislation against the revival of the rule of the Pope. Lord 
John Russell was weak enough or mean enough to allow 
himself to be carried away by the ruling frenzy, wrote a 
letter in denunciation of the action of the Pope, and promised 
legislation. 

In Ireland this new move on the part of the British 
Minister provoked a counter-storm of popular passion as 
wild and as widespread. As the English people were 
startled by the bugbear of the ever-hateful Pope, the Irish 
were roused to fury by the dread that their religion was once 
more, and in the nineteenth century, to be subjected to some 
renewal of the penal code that is one of the worst and 
bitterest recollections in the history of English rule and Irish 
suffering. , It was probable that in this feeling all other 
interests and passions would be swallowed up. 

This was the danger which the really honest members of 
the Tenant League foresaw. The ' No Popery ' agitation 
roused up again those passions between Irishmen of different 
creeds which had been submerged in the great movement 
for tenant right ; and the different creeds, forgetting their 
common wrongs and sufferings, might be drawn off from the 
land question. While, then, the southern tenant-righters 
sympathised with their countrymen in their hatred and con- 
tempt of the bigotry of Englishmen and the imbecility of 
Lord John Russell, they saw with considerable misgiving the 
prominence which the new and the sectarian agitation was 
taking in the popular mind. 

There was another body of men, however, to which this 
new movement was a godsend. Of this party William Keogh 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 131 

and John Sadleir were the chief spokesmen —two of the most 
remarkable and most sinister figures in Irish history. 

Physically and mentally Keogh was intended for a leader 
of democracy. Though small of stature he had a chest of 
enormous depth, had a muscular and powerful frame, and a 
courage that was arrogant, audacious, inflexible. The face 
bespoke the immense moral and mental force of the man. 
In his earlier years it bore a singular resemblance to that of 
the first Napoleon, and even when it had grown flaccid and 
flabby it still wore an appearance of dignity and strength. 
His look was calculated to inspire respect and even awe. 
Though ignorant of law and generally illiterate, he had a 
marvellous command of fluent, striking, vigorous language. 
He was coarse and vulgar in taste, and there was a dash of 
commonplace in everything he said. The ' Nation,' which 
was his chief assailant throughout his political career, de- 
scribed his ' invective ' as a ' deluge of dirt,' and his ' most 
pretentious oratory ' as ' a jumble of bog Latin and flatulent 
English.' But his words, set off by a sonorous voice, vivid 
gesture, and his expressive and commanding face, made him 
the idol of mobs and the most competent orator at popular 
meetings. At the time when he entered politics he embarked 
upon his new career as on a desperate chance that would lead 
on to great fortune or hopeless ruin. In one of the most ex- 
citing and critical moments of his career the bailiffs were 
said to be in his house, and even when he was fighting one 
of his hard electoral contests the House of Commons was 
wading through sheaves of his unpaid bills, in order to find 
whether he had the then necessary qualification of 300/. a 
year over all his debts. But of this afterwards. 

A judicial office in Ireland was then, as indeed it is now, 
the haven in which the hard-pressed lawyer discovered wealth, 
ease, and dignity. On the principle that runs uniform 
through all the veins and arteries of English administration 
in Ireland, the salaries of judicial office are fixed at a figure 
far beyond what even the most successful lawyer is in the 
habit of making at the Bar. In fact, a puisne judgeship in 
Ireland occupies towards the working lawyer an exactly 
reverse position to that which it holds in England. In 



i 3 2 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

England, the lawyer who accepts a puisne judgeship, or even 
a much higher office, usually does so at an immense sacrifice 
of income ; in Ireland, the judicial office usually gives to the 
lawyer the first opportunity in his life of making something 
like an equilibrium between income and expenditure. Then 
the number of judges being far in excess of the requirements 
of public business, the fortunate holders of this situation spend 
all the year in comparative, and nearly half the year in abso- 
lute, idleness. The judges in Ireland too are members of the 
Privy Council. They meet and discuss with the other great 
officers of the State questions of policy and of government,, 
with a mixture of judicial and executive functions which in 
England would shock every accepted principle of sound 
administration. The Irish judge is, therefore, after his eleva- 
tion to the Bench, at once an active and a combative politi- 
cian — one of the rulers of the State. It was one of the worst 
features in a thoroughly unsound state of things that the 
puisne judge was often promoted to a higher office — the 
Chief Justiceship of his own Court, the Mastership of the 
Rolls, or the Lord Chancellorship. Sometimes he received a 
solace for being passed over in a great and highly-paid com- 
mission ; such as the commissionership of the Irish Church 
Act, with a salary of 2,000/. a year, that was conferred on. 
Mr. Justice Lawson. 

To such a man as Keogh such an office offered the 
highest prize of fortune. It conferred high pay, and he was 
dreadfully needy ; dignity, and he was notoriously disrepu- 
table ; security, and his life was a series of hairbreadth escapes 
in the tempestuous sea of Irish politics. It is now clear 
that, from the first moment he embarked on a political career,, 
a judgeship was Keogh's single purpose. 

For this end he was ready to don the livery of every political 
party in turn ; to pass through mud-baths of deception, lying 
and broken oaths ; to assume all the worst arts of the 
demagogue ; to be foul-mouthed, audacious, sometimes even 
murderous in advice ; and then to betray the mob as quickly 
and shamelessly as he had pandered to its worst passions. 

His first entrance into public life was in 1847. At that 
time he was known as a barrister without clients and without 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 133 

law ; indeed, at no period of his professional career, until he 
became a law officer of the Crown, did he obtain as much 
professional business as would keep the bloodhound of insur- 
mountable debt from the door ; and never, to his dying 
day, did he master even the elementary principles of his 
profession. 

It was for my native town of Athlone that Keogh stood. 
Tradition still retails many of his strange exploits. His 
courage, for instance, was over and over again proved by the 
absolute fearlessness with which he encountered mobs in- 
flamed with drink and the violent passions that election 
contests excite. He was known to march through the streets 
when a perfect hailstorm of stones was flying against him and 
his supporters. On pne occasion, when he was delivering a 
speech from a window to a noisy and violent crowd, some- 
body threw a soda-water bottle at his head. ' That's a mighty 

bad shot, ,' said Keogh, mentioning the name of the 

person who had fired the bottle — a well-known local politician. 
Equally are there stories of the desperate remedies to which men 
resort who are hard pressed for money and troubled neither 
by scruples nor abashed by shame. For instance, he is said 
to have raised money in several cases by the trick not un- 
known to the London police courts of borrowing five pounds 
on each half of a five-pound note. Then there is the dim 
recollection of a strange scene which forecast the tragic end 
to his strange and evil career. One night he was expecting, 
as the tradition goes, some money from one of the political 
clubs of London in aid of his candidature. A near relative 
was to be the bearer of the much-needed treasure ; and when 
he arrived he had to announce that his mission was a failure. 
Keogh fell prone on the floor, grovelled there with the contor- 
tions and groans of one demented, and finally, when the agony 
had passed, rose up, went out into the town, and harangued 
the mobs with a self-confidence as great, a wit as ready, a 
hopefulness as inflexible as if his highest expectations had 
been realised. Another reason of his success was his con- 
viviality. He was all through his life a heavy drinker, and 
loved all the pleasures of the table. However late the night 
or heavy the drinking, Keogh was always the first to rise in 



134 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the morning ; and with the ' terrible familiarity ' with men's 
names and characteristics, which was one of his talents, he 
was at the bedside of the companions of his debauch the 
next morning with a brandy-and-soda in his hand and the 
christian-name of the scarcely recovered inebriate in his 
mouth. 

In order to understand the history of the time it is also 
necessary to know something of the character of the con- 
stituency in which Keogh played these parts. In defence of 
my native town, I must premise that it was neither better nor 
worse than the majority of the Irish and the English consti- 
tuencies of that period. Its eminence consisted in the fact 
that the number of the voters was small, and that, therefore, 
the amount of the bribe was high. It was generally computed 
that this bribe averaged 30/. or 40/. the vote ; and there were 
tales of a vote having run up to even 100/. in one of Keogh's 
most hotly contested elections. The town, finely situated on 
the Shannon, with a large barracks and a castle old in story, 
plays an important part in the history of Ireland, and was for 
many centuries the most prosperous centre in the midland 
counties ; but the famine swept the country round, and for 
years before the period at which Keogh began to figure in its 
history it had been steadily deteriorating. A large number 
of its people were, therefore, engaged in a desperate struggle 
with hard fortune, and, though centuries old, the position of 
the town had some resemblance to one of the mushroom 
towns of the United States — say like Virginia City — which, 
owing their rise to some accidental and transitory cause, like 
the discovery of a mine, have a season of extreme prosperity, 
and then for years continue the struggle with departing 
fortune. In such a town it is not surprising that the election 
played a prominent part. With many of the people the 
periodic bribe entered into the whole economy of their poor, 
shrivelled, squalid, weary lives. Men continued to live in 
houses that had better have lived in lodgings, because the 
house gave a vote. The very whisper of a dissolution sent a 
visible thrill through the town, and the prospect of common 
gain swallowed up amid the people all other passions, religious 
and political, and united ordinarily discordant forces in amity 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 135 

and brotherhood. There was, as there is, a tolerably strong 
minority of Protestants in the town ; between the Protes- 
tant and the Catholic there was irreconcilable difference of 
political as well as of religious feeling ; and, indeed, there was 
rarely any social intercourse between people of the two creeds. 
But at election time the Catholic and the Protestant forgot 
their rivalries, remembered the interests only of their town, 
and fought strenuously and side by side in loving union for 
the man who gave the highest bribe. There was a highly 
respected Protestant tradesman in the town when I was 
a boy who had a large repute for political wisdom, and was 
generally esteemed ; and I remember hearing a well-known 
saying of his quoted, which put the philosophy of Irish elec- 
tioneering in these times in a compendious form. ' I am a 

Protestant,' Ned used to say, ' and my father was a 

Protestant, and his father before him ; but the man I want 
to see returned for Athlone is the man that leaves the money 
in the town.' 

Such was the constituency, the representation of which 
Keogh sought in 1 847. The circumstances of his candidature 
sufficiently foreshadowed his subsequent career. In that year, 
as is known, the supreme struggle in Ireland was between 
Young Ireland and the Repeal party. But Keogh had no 
part in this struggle between different sections of Irish 
nationalists. He knew his own purpose and he knew his 
constituency. Attachment to either of these two sections 
might have been inconvenient in subsequent years to a seeker 
after English office, and the constituency cared for the money 
and not for the politics of its candidates. He stood, then, 
as a member of an English party ; he called himself a 
Peelite. This political character had the additional advantage 
of being entirely indefinite ; for this was the period of the 
schism between the Free Trade Conservatives under Sir 
Robert Peel and the Protectionist Conservatives under Mr. 
Disraeli ; and it was still an undecided question whether the 
healing of the schism would turn the Peelites back into the 
Conservative fold or its continuance would transform them 
into Liberals. Another curious fact about the candidature 
of Keogh was that the expenses, or a portion of them, 



136 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

were paid by an Englishman. This was Mr. Attwood, the 
well-known banker. 

Mr. Attwood had some doctrines on the currency ques- 
tion which he was anxious to have advocated in Parliament, 
and he thought that the expenses of a contest in Athlone 
would be compensated for by the assistance of the glib and 
brilliant tongue of Keogh. Keogh was opposed by a local 
gentleman named O'Beirne. Keogh was elected. The num- 
bers at the poll tell their own tale of the state of the country 
and the character of the constituency. They were : 

Keogh, William 101 

O'Beirne, William 95 

But this success did not for some years bring Keogh any 
change in his desperate fortunes. It rather aggravated his 
difficulties. Professional business did not come ; the elec- 
tion for Athlone was an expensive luxury, and cost more 
than Mr. Attwood had supplied, and Keogh was sunk in a 
profounder morass of debt than before. 

At the same election of 1847 John Sadleir had been 
returned for Carlow. In every respect Sadleir was the anti- 
thesis of Keogh. Keogh was garrulous ; Sadleir was taci- 
turn ; Keogh was the boisterous and familiar don vivant, with 
exuberant health and spirits ; Sadleir was reserved, unsocial, 
and had the sallow complexion of the man who neither cares 
for nor enjoys the pleasures of the table ; finally, Keogh was 
hopelessly poor, and Sadleir had the reputation of boundless 
wealth. John Sadleir was trained as a solicitor, and was 
intended by his people probably for the quiet life of an Irish 
lawyer. But he was ambitious and self-confident, and made 
for London. Here he became a ' Parliamentary agent,' and 
gained an acquaintance with the financial state of Ireland 
which he afterwards turned to great use. He gradually 
drifted into a financier, and conceived the idea of making a 
fortune rapidly. He adopted an excellent plan to start with. 
The Irish farmer had not yet become to any large extent a 
depositor in banks ; Sadleir established the Tipperary Joint- 
Stock Bank. He came of a family that had the reputation 
of being wealthy, his own claim to financial ability was 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 137 

everywhere admitted, and the people deposited their money 
with the confidence of unquestioning faith. ' From the 
Shannon to the Suir,' writes A. M. Sullivan, 1 ' " Sadleir's bank " 
was regarded. with as much confidence as "the old lady of 
Threadneedle Street " commands from her votaries.' The 
money which Sadleir thus obtained from the grimy pockets 
of the Irish farmers he invested in English speculations, 
became in this way intimate with the money market of 
London, and was made chairman of the London and County 
Joint-Stock Bank. Every day he was credited with greater 
schemes and with more fabulous success. 

To such a man Parliament offered chances of still further 
increasing his wealth and satisfying his ambition. His large 
command of money gave him a great advantage in that dread 
period of desolation and demoralisation in the political 
fortunes of Ireland, and he conceived, and to a large extent 
carried out, the project of building up in the House of 
Commons a party bound to him by ties of blood or of 
financial aid. One cousin — Robert Keatinge — was returned 
at the same time as himself for County Waterford ; Frank 
Scully, another cousin, was returned for Tipperary. This 
was at the 1847 election ; subsequently, in 1852, Mr. Vincent 
Scully, his nephew, was returned for County Cork. The 
Sadleirite party consisted, besides, of two brothers named 
O'Flaherty (Anthony and Edmund), of a Doctor Maurice 
Power, of Mr. Monsell (now disguised under the name of 
Lord Emly), and of Mr. William Keogh. How far and 
how many of these men were indebted to Sadleir for pecu- 
niary assistance it is impossible, of course, to say ; but two 
of them were certainly in his pay — Edmund O'Flaherty and 
William Keogh. The desperate fortunes of Keogh craved 
for help wherever it might come from ; Sadleir on one occa- 
sion, as will be seen, subscribed 100/. for his election 
expenses ; and. subsequently the name of Keogh was to 
many of the bills which were put in circulation by Edmund 
O'Flaherty. Keogh said his name was forged ; possibly the 
statement was true ; but it would not be surprising if it were 

1 New Ireland, p. 157. 



138 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

false. This is not an uncharitable or unwarrantable conclu- 
sion, as will be subsequently seen. 

The object of Sadleir and his associates was, of course, 
personal advancement, and personal advancement alone. 
But personal advancement could only be obtained from an 
English Minister ; and the rise of the new Tenant Right 
movement, hostile to the principles of every English Ministry 
of that period, was therefore to the Sadleirites the omen of 
defeat, and not the augury of hope. It seemed probable that 
the movement would become — as every national movement 
before or since, that has ever got a chance in Ireland, has 
become — a great national force, impossible to resist ; and that 
no constituency would accept any man who did not fight in 
its ranks. Then an idea was being put forward which would 
be still more fatal to such purposes as those of Sadleir and 
Keogh. It will be remembered that the great point of con- 
troversy between Old and Young Ireland was as to the pledge 
against office-seeking. The break-up of the hideous party of 
1847 gave terrible confirmation to the objections which the 
Younglrelandershad brought against the tribe of office-seekers ; 
and all Ireland now agreed in the opinion that nothing was to 
be gained from any Ministry by any party but a party of 
independent men. Gavan Duffy, and the other survivors of 
Young Ireland who had joined in the new movement, insisted 
that the old pledge should be revived, pointing out that the 
land question could never be settled in any other way. Thus, 
then, the Tenant Right movement had two distinct principles 
— a principle as to the end to be attained, and a principle as 
to the policy for attaining it. The party not only believed 
that Tenant Right was essential for the prosperity of Ireland, 
but believed as firmly that Tenant Right could only be won 
by an Irish party which would oppose every Ministry that 
did not make Tenant Right a policy by which to stand or 
fall. In other words, the policy of the Tenant Righters was 
the very opposite of that of the Sadleirites ; the one wanted 
Tenant Right, and did not care for Ministries ; the other 
wanted office, and did not care for Tenant Right. The 
struggle was visible in the very earliest days of the Tenant 
Right movement ; its break-out was inevitable ; and if a 



THE GREAT -BETRAYAL 139 

struggle had taken place while the country was united and 
enthusiastic about Tenant Right, it is probable that Sadleir 
and Keogh would have been driven from public life and the 
Tenant Right battle have been won. 

But the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill produced the disastrous 
diversion that postponed this struggle. Sadleir and Keogh 
were not slow to see the use to which Lord John Russell's 
proposals could be turned. Of course, the Ecclesiastical 
Titles Bill was a question upon which certain sections of the 
English people felt strongly at that moment. But Keogh 
and Sadleir probably knew that such outbursts of passion are 
as transitory as they are violent. Then the Bill was not a 
favourite with any English party ; Mr. Disraeli gave it at first 
but a half-hearted support on the part of the Conservatives ; 
it had strong opponents, they thought, in Mr. Gladstone, Sir 
James Graham, and the other Peelites ; and there was every 
reason to think that even Lord John Russell himself had no 
great joy in his legislative child. It was unlike Tenant 
Right, which menaced great interests, at that moment as 
supreme in the Lower as in the Upper House of Parliament, 
and which was equally unacceptable to all sections of Parlia- 
mentary opinion except the insignificant group of Radicals. 
On the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, then, a politician could be 
as violent as he pleased, without making himself everlastingly 
objectionable to anybody except to Mr. Newdegate ; while a 
strong position on the land question might mean permanent 
exclusion from office. Finally, Sadleir and Keogh knew the 
passionate attachment of the Irish people to their religion ; 
and shrewdly calculated that any politician who was able to 
pose as a defender of that religion would establish a claim to 
their confidence and affections which it would take much to 
shake. 

Accordingly, in the House of Commons, Keogh and 
Sadleir opposed the Bill with extraordinary vehemence of 
language and of tactics. They exhausted the forms of the 
House, they fought the Bill obstinately and clause by clause. 
A portion of the Irish people, looking on at this struggle, 
were easily led to believe that it was heroic ; and the 
Sadleirites, playing upon another weakness, endeared them- 



140 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

selves still further to Irish hearts by styling themselves ' the 
Irish Brigade ' — the name of those exiled Irish warriors who 
fought heroically on every battle-field of Europe, after unjust 
laws had exiled them from their own country. By the 
English the party were known by the less flattering title of 
the ' Pope's Brass Band.' 

In Ireland, meantime, the two agitations went on side by 
side. Great Catholic demonstrations were everywhere held, 
and Sadleir was the organiser and Keogh the orator of these 
demonstrations. At these meetings the Prelates of the 
Catholic Church attended, and Keogh excelled everybody 
else in the extravagant fulsomeness of the eulogies which he 
poured upon their heads. It was a singular fatality that at 
this very period an Irish Prelate was first getting into pro- 
minence who was destined to be a main though unconscious, 
and perhaps innocent, instrument in. the game Keogh and 
Sadleir were playing. This was Paul Cullen, afterwards 
Cardinal Cullen and Archbishop of Dublin. At this period 
he had just been appointed Archbishop of Armagh. He had 
been for many years the head of the Irish College in Rome 
and it was a favourite reproach against him that he was more 
of a Roman monk than an Irish patriot. So far as I can 
gather his policy, he regarded it as his main if not sole duty 
to look after the interest of his Church, rather than the 
purely secular interests of politics. For this reason his whole 
political influence was thrown in on the side of any politician 
who had anything to give the Church. In after struggles, 
Cardinal Cullen was always on the side of the ' Government ' 
as against all struggles of Nationalists, on the principle that 
England could do more for the interests of the Church than 
any National Party. England could serve the Church in 
Ireland through concessions on the education question ; she 
could serve the Church generally and in a wider area by her 
influence as a great power in the Councils of Europe ; and she 
could tolerate or persecute millions of Catholics scattered 
through her world-wide empire. This policy — intelligible 
from the standpoint of the Churchman — Cardinal Cullen 
pursued for upwards of a quarter of a century with a purpose 
that never swerved, and with a devotion that belonged to a 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 141 

man whose life was swallowed up in his principles. At a 
period later than this, Cardinal Cullen had means for giving 
effect to his will so large as to make him the greatest stand- 
ing force in Irish politics. The power of the Catholic clergy- 
man was almost unshaken ; throughout every town and 
village in Ireland the Catholic priest, strong in the affection of 
his flock, and, in the majority of cases, the best educated man 
in his district, was almost a political autocrat "; and over the 
action of nearly every priest in Ireland Cardinal Cullen had 
control. He was the Prelate whose voice was practically law 
at the Holy See in regard to all Irish ecclesiastical affairs ; a 
few clergymen who resisted his will were summarily crushed, 
and every vacancy in the episcopate was filled with his 
nominees. Archbishop MacHale, and a few of the elder 
generation of prelates who had shared in O'Connell's struggle 
for repeal of the Union, resisted his influence to the end ; 
but practically, for many years, Cardinal Cullen was the 
Catholic Church in Ireland, and had all that mighty organi- 
sation under his word of command. 

On August 19, 185 1, a great meeting was held in the 
Rotunda, in Dublin, for the purpose of forming a ' Catholic 
Defence Association.' Over this meeting Archbishop Cullen 
presided. Mr. John Sadleir was one of the secretaries, and 
William Keogh was the chief speaker. To the chairman of 
the meeting Keogh was laboriously complimentary. ' I now,' 
he said, ' as one of her Majesty's Counsel, whether learned or 
unlearned in the law, holding the Act of Parliament in my 
hand, unhesitatingly give his proper title to the Lord Bishop 
of Armagh.' These words received further emphasis as he 
held the Act of Parliament thus defined in his- outstretched 
hand. At a meeting of his constituents in Athlone he paid 
even higher court to another Catholic prelate — Archbishop 
MacHale — who then, and for many years afterwards, exer- 
cised enormous influence. 'I see here,' said Keogh, 'the 
venerated prelates of my Church, first among them, " the 
observed of all observers," the illustrious Archbishop of Tuam, 
who, like that lofty tower which rises upon the banks of the 
yellow Tiber, the pride and protection of the city, is at once 
the glory and the guardian, the decus et tut amen of the Catholic 



142 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

religion.' John Sadleir was also one of the speakers at this 
meeting. 

Meantime the Tenant Right movement had been growing, 
and Keogh and Sadleir found it necessary to affect devotion 
to its purposes and policy. Over and over again they pledged 
themselves not to accept office from any Ministry that did not 
make Tenant Right a Cabinet question. Nor was this all. 
Under the example of the Tenant League, the Catholic 
Association also formulated the policy of pledging the Irish 
members to accept no office from any Ministry which did not 
make the Repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act a Cabinet 
question ; and to that pledge Keogh over and over again gave 
his adhesion. 

But Gavan Duffy, the other writers in the ' Nation ' and 
' Freeman's Journal,' and all the earnest Tenant Righters, 
still disbelieved in the ' Irish Brigade,' and Keogh and 
Sadleir were more than once accused of being office-seekers. 
These charges, repeated over and over again, made wider a 
distinct line of cleavage in the Tenant League, as the Tenant 
Right organisation was called. The two parties were watchful 
and distrustful of each other, and between the two there 
arose a fight for life. The position of Sadleir and Keogh at 
this period was desperate. The fight in which they were 
engaged meant dazzling success or shameful and abysmal 
ruin. Sadleir, as will be seen, was reaching the point where 
exposure could no longer be avoided, and he had to make his 
desperate choice between the life of the convict and the death 
of the suicide. The position of Keogh was equally desperate. 
He was deeper than ever in debt ; as has been seen, the 
waiters at some of the entertainments in his house in Dublin 
were bailiffs in disguise ; arrest dogged his fleeing footsteps 
wherever he went, and arrest meant social, professional, 
political death. The hungry army of his creditors watched 
the rise and fall of his chequered fortunes with the wolfish 
glare of peasant depositors in a shaky bank ; the least slip 
or mishap, and they were down upon him, and then chaos 
was come again. It was possible that fate had a darker future 
for him than even enforced exile. How far he was acquainted 
with the financial enterprises of John Sadleir is not known, 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 143 

nor how deeply he was involved in the embezzlements of Mr. 
Edmund O'Flaherty. But he was an intimate and a debtor 
of the two men, and might well be implicated in some of their 
misdeeds. In his darker hours he may have shuddered at 
the thought that he had brought himself within the reach of 
the criminal law. The judicial bench or the convict's dock — 
these were the dread stakes that awaited the result of the 
game. 

And the game was one of the wildest chance. The 
whole national press of the country was against him. Sadleir 
had established a paper called the ' Catholic Telegraph.' It was 
a journal of ultra-religious fervour, went into fits of lunacy 
over the Titles Bill, and while upholding Sadleir and Keogh 
as the spotless champions of the Act, shook its head sadly 
over the orthodoxy of Gavan Duffy and the other advocates 
of Tenant Right. But the ' Catholic Telegraph ' had not the 
power of the national journals, and day after day the ' Freeman's 
Journal,' week after week the ' Nation,' dogged the utterances, 
watched the shifts, exposed the devices of Sadleir and Keogh. 
The overwhelming majority of the country, too, believed in the 
Tenant Righters and disbelieved in the Catholic champions. 
Against this mighty combination in front, Keogh had in his 
flank the few desperate shopkeepers of Athlone, whom his 
money had bought and the money of another man could buy 
again. Thus attacked in front and behind, and from all sides, 
he had no weapons of defence but his tongue, his brazen 
audacity, his desperate courage, and the adhesion or neutrality 
of a certain number of Catholic bishops. 

These facts will explain to the reader the strange ma- 
noeuvres Keogh had to employ. The thing above all things he 
wanted was office ; the thing he was called above all things 
to forswear was office. At all the meetings, then, whether 
of the Catholic Defence Association or the Tenant League, 
he was bound above all others in the pledge against taking 
office, unless under conditions then impossible. 

'As I said, Whigs or Tories, Peelites or Protectionists,' he said 
to his constituents at Athlone in the speech already alluded to, in 
which he paid Archbishop MacHale such fulsome compliments, 
'are all the same to me. ... I know that in the career in which we 



i 4 4 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

are engaged we will have to meet open hostility. That we can do. 
We had, and I know we will have again, treacherous friends. These 
also we can dispose of. I will fight for my religion and my country, 
scorning and defying calumny, meeting boldly honourable foes, 
seeking out treacherous friends ; and as long as I have the confi- 
dence of the people, I declare in the most solemn manner, before 
this august assembly, I shall not regard any party. / know that the 
road I take does not lead to preferment. I do not belong to the 
Whigs ; / never will belong to the Whigs. I do not belong to the 
Tories ; I never will have anything to do with them.' 

Thus he had separated himself from the two great parties 
in the English Parliament. There was, however, a third party 
in the House of Commons, which was one of its most notice- 
able and important elements. This was the party of the 
Peelites — the party under whose banner Keogh had fought 
when first he stood for Athlone. From that party also the 
incorruptible patriot cut himself off. 

' I have read in the newspapers this morning,' he said, ' that Mr. 
Frederick Peel has joined the Whig Government, and that it is 
likely men of whose acquaintance I am proud will become com- 
ponent parts of the Administration. Here, in the presence of my 
constituents and my country — and I hope I am not so base a man 
as to make an avowal which could be contradicted to-morrow, if I 
was capable of doing that which is insinuated against me — I solemnly 
declare, if there was a Peelite administration in office to-morrow it 
would be nothing to me. ... If all the Peelites in the House joined 
the Whig administration, / would be their unmitigated, their icntiring, 
their i7idefatigable opponent, until we obtain full justice? 1 

And then, to be completely explicit, he went on to define 
what he meant by the ' full justice,' the attainment of which 
should precede any acceptance of office. 

'And what is that justice? I can state the terms of it well. I 
will not support any party which will not make it the first ingredient 
of their political existence to repeal the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. 
I will not join any party which does not go much farther that that. 
I will have nothing to do with any party which, without interfering 
with the religious belief of the Protestant population, will not consent to 

1 A Record of Traitorism, or the Political Life and Adventures of Mr. Justice 
Keogh, by T. D. Sullivan, p. 5. 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 145 

remove from off the Catholics of this country the intolerable burden 
of sustaining a Church Establishment with which they are not in 
communion. . . . And . . . I will not support any political party 
which does not make it part of its political creed to do all justice to the 
tenant in Ireland. I tvill not support any party which will not place 
on a satisfactory footing the relations of landlord and tenant? x 

Nothing could be more explicit than this language, nothing 
more binding than those pledges ; the whole gospel of the 
Tenant League, and even something more, was subscribed to 
by Mr. Keogh, and yet the Tenant Leaguers were suspicious, 
and the ' Freeman's Journal ' and the ' Nation ' still openly 
expressed their want of faith in even these solemn pledges of 
the champions of religion. An incident confirmed these 
doubts. In February, 1852, Lord John Russell was defeated 
by the combination of Lord Palmerston with the Conser- 
vatives on the Militia Bill, and the first Derby-Disraeli 
administration came into office. Dr. Maurice Power, M.P. 
for Cork, was offered and accepted office as Governor of St. 
Lucia. Dr. Power was a foremost and active member of the 
' Irish Brigade' ; and at once the Tenant Leaguers foretold 
that as Power had gone, so also would go Sadleir and Keogh. 
These doubts were finally expressed to Keogh's face. He 
and Sadleir, immediately after the promotion of Power, started 
Mr. Vincent Scully, a nephew of Sadleir, as their candidate. 

On Monday, March 8, 1852, Keogh was present at a 
meeting in the city of Cork in support of the candidature of 
Mr. Scully. He had been assailed with even more than its 
usual vigour in that week's issue of the ' Nation.' Mr. McCarthy 
Downing, who long years afterwards was member for County 
Cork, belonged to the Tenant Righters, and at this meeting 
openly expressed his doubts of the honesty of Keogh and 
Sadleir and the ' Irish Brigade.' 

'I will tell the meeting fairly and honestly,' said Mr. Downing. 
' that I believe the Irish Brigade are not sincere advocates of the 
Tenant Right question. I state that, and I believe it is in the presence 
of two of them. I attended two great meetings in the Music Hall 
in Dublin, at the inauguration of the Tenant League, at my own 
expense, when a deputation waited upon the Brigade to attend the 
1 T. D. Sullivan's Record, pp. 5-6. 



146 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

meeting, and I protest I never saw a beast drawn to the slaughter- 
house by the butcher to receive the knife with more difficulty than 
there was in bringing to that meeting the members of the Irish 
Brigade.' x 

'Then up rose Mr. Keogh,' writes A. M. Sullivan, 2 'and 
never, perhaps, were his marvellous gifts more requisite than 
at this critical moment. The future fate and fortunes of his 
leaders and party hung on the turn affairs might take at this 
meeting, an open challenge and public charge having been 
thus flung down against them. There were a few hostile 
cries when he stood up, but silence was after a while ob- 
tained. With flushed countenance and heaving breast he 
burst forth in these words : — 

' Great God ! ' he exclaimed, ' in this assemblage of Irishmen, have 
you found that those who are most ready to take every pledge have 
been the most sincere in perseverance to the end, or have you not 
rather seen that they who, like myself, went into Parliament perfectly 
unpledged, not supported by the popular voice, but in the face of 
popular acclaim, when the time for trial comes are not found want- 
ing? I declared myself in the presence of the bishops of Ireland, 
and of my colleagues in Parliament, that let the Minister of the day 
be whom he may — let him be the Earl of Derby, let him be Sir John 
Graham, or Lord John Russell — it was all the same to us ; and, so 
help me God, no matter who the Minister may be, no matter who 
the party in power may be, I will neither support that Minister nor 
that party unless he comes into power prepared to carry the 
measures which universal popular Ireland demands. I have aban- 
doned my own profession to join in cementing and forming an Irish 
Parliamentary party. That has been my ambition. It may be a 
base .one. I think it an honourable one. I have seconded the pro- 
position of Mr. Sharman Crawford in the House of Commons. I 
have met the Minister upon it to the utmost extent of my limited 
abilities, at a moment when disunion was not expected. So help me 
God ! upon that and every other question to which I have given my 
adhesion I will be — and I know I may say that every o le of my 
friends is as determined as myself — an unflinching, undeviating, 
unalterable supporter of it.' 

' No wonder,' writes A. M. Sullivan, continuing his de- 
scription of the scene, ' the assemblage who had listened as 

1 T, D. Sullivan's Record, p. 7. " New Ireland, p. 161. 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 147 

if spellbound while he spoke, sprang to their feet, and with 
vociferous cheering atoned for their previous doubts of the 
man whose oath had now sealed his public principles.' ' 

In the midst of this struggle between the different sections 
of the Irish members the Derby-Disraeli ministry went to the 
country. At the general election in Ireland the combatants 
had their representatives among the candidates for the 
different constituencies. Roughly, the candidates might be 
divided into Tories and Whigs, pledged to either of the two 
great English parties, the Tenant Leaguers, and what were 
known as the Catholic Defenders. The latter were the men 
who were pushing the sectarian questions to the front in order 
to drive the land question to the rear, and they were under 
the direction, secretly or openly, of the Keogh-Sadleir brigade. 
In some constituencies the two sections came into collision, 
but the final result was a drawn battle, in which both sides 
gained and lost something. 

Some of the most important leaders of the Tenant 
Leaguers had been returned. Gavan Duffy was elected for 
New Ross, John Francis Maguire for Dungarvan, George 
Henry Moore for the county of Mayo, and Frederic Lucas 
for the county of Meath. Moore was a great addition to the 
strength of the Tenant Leaguers. A landlord, he sympa- 
thised vehemently with the demand of the tenants for security 
in their holdings. He had also oratorical gifts of a high order, 
and his political honesty was inflexible. Frederic Lucas, an 
Englishman and a Protestant by birth, had changed both his 
religious and national faith ; he had become a Catholic and 
an Irish nationalist. Connected by marriage with Mr. John 
Bright, a man of independent fortune and of a pure and lofty 
character, he held high rank in his party, and his name still 
has its place in the affections of the Irish people. He was 
proprietor of the ' Tablet,' a journal which still exists. The 
' Tablet ' at this period was a strongly national journal, and was 
one of the constant assailants of Keogh and Sadleir. There 
was one important defeat. Dr. (afterwards Sir John) Gray, 
proprietor of the ' Freeman's Journal,' was defeated for Mona- 
ghan. The Irish Brigade was entirely successful. Sadleir 

1 New Ireland, p. 162. 



148 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

and his three relatives, Francis and Vincent Scully and 
Robert Keatinge, were re-elected ; James, his brother — of 
whom more anon — was elected for Tipperary ; Anthony 
O'Flaherty was re-elected for Gal way ; Mr. Monsell for Lime- 
rick ; and Keogh for Athlone. 

In the general election Keogh took a prominent and active 
part. His tongue was at the service of everybody who fought 
under the flag of the Catholic Defence Association — that is, 
of John Sadleir and himself. His speeches were remarkable, 
even in that vituperative period, for the violence of their 
language, the brutality and criminality of his appeals to the 
mob. One of his speeches in particular became the object of 
notice. In Westmeath the struggle was between Captain 
Magan, a friend and associate of Keogh, and Sir R. Levinge, 
a local landlord. In the town of Moate Keogh made a speech 
in favour of Captain Magan, and in the course of that speech 
he used these words : ' Boys, we are in the midst of a delight- 
ful summer, when the days are long and the nights are short ; 
next comes autumn, when the days and nights are of equal 
length ; but next comes dreary winter, when the days are 
short and the nights long ; and woe be to those, during those 
long nights, who vote for Sir Richard Levinge at the present 
election.' ! 

These terrible words derived additional significance from 
the surroundings under which they were delivered. Westmeath 
is one of the counties where eviction has raged most fiercely, 
with most widespread desolation, with circumstances of 
tragic suffering. To-day, one driving for miles through a 
land bare of houses or human beings, and studded all around 
with the skeleton walls of ruined homes, finds it telling too 
plainly of the dread times through which the county has 
passed. The people of the county are a fierce and stalwart 
breed, and resisted doggedly, though impotently, their tyrants. 
In Westmeath, accordingly, the Ribbon and other societies, 
bound by oath to meet eviction with assassination, used to be 
particularly strong ; and the county has been the scene of 
some of the most terrible murders, and occasionally of the 
most violent epidemics of crime. It was more than probable 

4 New Ireland, p. 167. 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 149 

that, among the audience to which these words were addressed, 
there were many men goaded to blind fury by eviction, 
suffered or. impending, and organised with the object of 
avenging their wrongs in blood. 

The election of 1852 was at last over, and the Tenant 
Leaguers were the chief victors. They had not been able 
to exclude the Catholic Defenders, but they had compelled 
them to swallow the Tenant League pledge. The country 
instinctively felt the soundness of the doctrine, that to beg 
for office from the Minister and to demand justice for the 
tenant were irreconcilable positions ; and accordingly the 
pledge against taking office, except from a Government that 
made the settlement of the relations between landlord and 
tenant a Cabinet question, was enforced from every candidate 
for a popular constituency. When, accordingly, the Leaguers 
held a Tenant Right Conference on September 8, 1852, all 
the Irish members returned on popular principles — whether 
as Tenant Righters or as Catholic Defenders — were com- 
pelled to attend. There were forty Irish members present 
in all. A resolution was proposed which put into definite 
form the pledge already taken at the hustings. It was in 
these words : — 

Resolved : that in the opinion of this conference it is essential 
to the proper management of this cause that the Members of Parlia- 
ment who have been returned on Tenant Right principles should 
hold themselves perfectly independent of, and in opposition to, all 
Governments which do not make it part of their policy, and a 
Cabinet question, to give to the tenantry of Ireland a measure em- 
bodying the principles of Mr. Sharman Crawford's Bill. 

This resolution was proposed by Mr. Keogh ; it was 
carried with but one dissentient — Mr. Burke Roche, M.P., 
afterwards Lord Fermoy — c amid great cheering.' ' 

The position of parties in the House of Commons at the 
moment rendered it perfectly possible to carry out this policy 
to a successful issue. There were then three parties : the 
Whigs, under Lord John Russell ; the Protectionist Conserva- 
tives, under Mr. Disraeli ; and the Peelites. No one of these 

1 T. D. Sullivan's Record, p. 7. 



ISO THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

three parties had come back from the election sufficiently 
powerful. to govern by itself, and a Coalition Ministry was 
plainly the only one possible. The Irish party, numbering 
between forty and fifty members, had it in their power, if 
they preserved their unity, to make or mar any Ministry that 
could be formed by either of these contending sections ; they 
were absolute masters of the situation. The Peelites had, as 
has been seen, opposed the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and 
that gave them a place in the confidence of the Irish people. 
It was the universal expectation in Ireland that the Tenant 
Leaguers would form a coalition with the Peelites, based on 
the repeal of the Titles Act, and the grant of security of 
tenure to the tenants. 

Parliament met on November 4, 1852 ; on Friday, 
December 17 following, the Budget of Mr. Disraeli was 
rejected by a combination of different parties, and the 
Ministry resigned. The words of A. M. Sullivan, who was 
an active politician at the period, best describe what 
followed : — 

• ' A shout went up from Ireland. A thrill of the wildest 
excitement shook the island from the centre to the sea. 
Now joy and triumph — now torturing doubt — now the very 
agony of suspense, prevailed. What would the Irish party 
do ? Here was the crisis which was to shame their oaths or 
prove them true. No Liberal or composite administration 
was possible without them, and their demand was one no 
Minister had ever deemed to be just. What would the Irish 
members do ? The fate of the new Ministry, the fate of 
Ireland, was in their hands. 

' As terrible deeds are said to be sometimes preceded by a 
mysterious apprehension, so in the last week of that old year 
a vague gloom chilled every heart. The news from London 
was panted for, hour by hour. At length the blow fell. 
Tidings of treason and disaster came. The Brigade was sold 
to Lord Aberdeen ! John Sadleir was Lord of the Treasury ! 
William Keogh was Irish Solicitor-General ! Edmund 
O'Flaherty was Commissioner of Income-Tax ! And so on. 
The English people, fortunately accustomed for centuries to 
exercise the functions of political life, may well be unable to 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 151 

comprehend the paralysis which followed this blow in Ireland. 
The merchant of many ships may bear with composuie the 
wreck of one. But here was an argosy, freighted with the last 
and most precious hopes of a people already on the verge of 
ruin and despair, scuttled before their eyes by the men who 
had called on the Most High God to witness their fidelity ! 
The Irish tenantry had played their last stake and lost. A 
despairing stupor like to that of the famine time shrouded 
the land. Notices to quit fell " like snowflakes " all over the 
counties where the hapless farmers had " refused the land- 
lord " and voted for a Brigadier. But the banker-politician 
had won. His accustomed success had attended him. He 
was not as yet a peer, but he was a Treasury Lord. From 
their seats on the Treasury bench he and his comrade, " the 
Solicitor General," could smile calmly at the accusing coun- 
tenances of Duffy and Moore and Lucas The New Year's 
chimes rang in the triumph of John Sadleir's daring ambi- 
tion. Did no dismal minor tone, like mournful funeral knell, 
presage the sequel that was now so near at hand ? ' l 

But all was not yet lost. The new officials had to go 
before their constituencies for re-election ; and, poor as was 
the opinion of Irish patriots of the political morality of the 
constituencies of that period, it was hoped that the people 
would not be ready to condone treason so flagrant and so 
disastrous. It was resolved by the Tenant League to oppose 
the return of both Keogh for Athlone and Sadleir for Carlow, 
and deputations were appointed to go to both places. But 
when the deputations arrived at the constituencies they were 
astounded and shocked to find that, while all the rest of the 
country was loud in its curses or desperate in its wail over 
the destruction of national hopes, the constituencies thought 
either that nothing particular had happened, or that the 
traitors were to be congratulated on having got at the 
money and the patronage of the Government, and their con- 
stituents to be equally congratulated on their prospect of 
obtaining a share of the spoil. The state of feeling in 
Athlone and Carlow at this crisis of Irish history is one of 

1 New Ireland, pp. 167, 168. 



i>2 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the saddest proofs of the degradation which poverty and 
alien rule can bring about, even in a country so undying as 
Ireland in the ardour of its struggle against oppression. In 
Athlone in particular had bribery, poverty, and despair done 
their work effectively. The desperately needy voters saw, in 
a Government official, a man the better able to bribe them- 
selves and to obtain situations for their sons. These were 
the days before open competition, and nomination to a Civil 
Service situation was the appanage of the Parliamentary 
representative, and one of his chief means of advancing his 
interests with his constituents. This was especially the case 
in Ireland. Who but an Irishman can know the full hopeless- 
ness of the youth of one born in the lower middle-class of an 
Irish country town ? At home he sees squalor, the saddened 
foreheads of his parents, consumed by mean cares, by the 
bitter struggle to keep up appearances, by climbing up the ever- 
climbing wave of pecuniary embarrassment, in towns where 
the years bring dwindling population, decreasing trade, more 
hopeless effort. To the youth himself the future is utter dark- 
ness and dread emptiness. The shops, advancing in many' 
cases to bankruptcy, offer but small wages to only a few ; of 
manufactories, his only knowledge is through the crumbling 
ruins of the wool-mill or the distillery ; he can become a 
doctor only if he have the luck to live in a town with a 
Queen's college ; the legal profession, with its dinners in 
London and fees, used to be as inaccessible as a throne ; and 
so it is that in Ireland, perhaps alone of all countries, the limbs 
even of youth are shackled and its ardent spirit caged. The 
one pursuit the British Government has left to the youth of 
Ireland is the Civil Service. Thus it has come to pass that 
in Somerset House, at St. Martin's-le-Grand, and at all the 
other great Civil Service establishments of London, so great 
a proportion of the clerks are Irishmen. Entrance to a 
clerkship in the Civil Service had thus come to be regarded 
by the Athlone boy as the first step on the golden ladder of 
fortune. Keogh used his power of nomination in the most 
lavish manner ; it was a saying in Athlone in his day that 
every young fellow who could or could not write his name 
had obtained a place in the Customs, or some other of the 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 153 

public departments. It will be seen that the use which he 
made of this ' appointing power ' was one of the charges 
which were brought against him afterwards. 

This was the state of feeling by which the ardent spirits 
of the Tenant League found themselves confronted when they 
reached Athlone, and a similar state of things awaited those 
who went to Carlow. But the corruption of the people proved 
less shocking than the attitude of the clergy ; they also not 
only condoned but applauded the action of the traitors. An 
appeal was made by the Tenant Leaguers to the Bishops. 
From Dr. MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam, from the Bishop of 
Meath, and from the Bishop of Killala, there came prompt 
and emphatic condemnation of the acts of Keogh and 
Sadleir. This was good ; but there were other prelates whose 
disapproval was more urgently required, and would have been 
decisive. 

Dr. Cullen had been elevated from the see of Armagh to 
the Archbishopric of Dublin, and had at the same time been 
appointed Papal Legate. The whole country waited for a 
word from the new prelate, but Dr. Cullen obstinately held 
his peace, and silence, at the period, meant approval. In 
Athlone the Bishop took even stronger action in favour of 
Keogh. His name was Dr. Browne, and he had a reputation 
beyond that of any other bishop of the period for gentleness 
and piety. O'Connell had called him the ' Dove of Elphin/ 
and by this name he was familiar and dear to the people of 
his diocese. I can remember him as he used to sit in the 
parish chapel in Athlone ; a man of venerable appearance,, 
with a singular resemblance to the pictures of some of 
the saints whose looks the great painters have made im- 
mortal. The people of his diocese had for him a respect 
that amounted almost to worship, and in Athlone he was 
especially beloved. The people of the town had got it into 
their heads that Athlone really held the first place in his 
heart ; and there was an understanding that, when he died, 
Athlone would be privileged to receive his sainted remains. 
The man who gained the support of the Bishop was certain 
of election, and the Bishop gave his support to Keogh. The 
result of this difference of attitude produced even among the 



154 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

priests and bishops themselves a bitterness of feeling that 
prevailed for many years, and between two of the bishops, 
Dr. MacHale and Cardinal Cullen, it led to an estrangement 
that closed only with the grave. In every class, in fact, the 
fight was fought out with the frenzy which leads an armed 
population from words to civil war. 

Meantime, while the whole country was looking with such 
desperate tension to the result of the contest in Athlone, 
Keogh was faced by a difficulty that threatened to wreck all. 
The reader knows of the property qualification of this period ; 
it was charged against Keogh that he had not this qualifi- 
cation, and a committee of the House of Commons had been 
appointed to investigate the charge. In Ireland, the investi- 
gation was watched with a feeling of suspense not unmixed 
with . amusement. The financial difficulties of Keogh were 
notorious ; it was known that, instead of having 300/. a year 
over and above all incumbrances, he was in a shoreless sea of 
debt, and was not the possessor of three hundred pence that 
he could call his own. But he swore bravely through before 
the committee. The committee went through complicated 
rolls of bank bills, by which the briefless barrister had been 
able to keep himself afloat and live the life of the Member of 
Parliament ; and in the end, after the easy fashion of those 
good old days, held that he had proved his qualification, and 
so he was free to stand for Athlone. The influence of the 
Bishop, 1 the sums of money he had at his disposal, with the 
prosperous turn in his fortunes and a system of organised 
mob violence, were greatly in his favour. Mr. Thomas Norton, 

1 In his speech on the hustings, Keogh made the following allusion to the 
attitude of the Bishop : ' Since I came into town, no matter where I went, no 
matter by whom I was accompanied, whether in the town or around the town, 
upon the hill-side or the ditch-side, on the public read or the narrow by-way, 
or in any other imaginable place, I have been received as the man of the people. 
How many hundred women have said this morning, "May God bless you !" 
How many hundred pretty girls have wished me success ! (A female voice — 
"You have the bishop's blessing, which is better than all.") Mr. Keogh — Yes ; 
and I am authorised to announce to you, and he does not shrink from the an- 
nouncement — you all know it ; you all saw it — that I have the support, the con- 
fidence, the kind wishes, and the anxious throbbing expectations for my success 
of my revered friend the Roman Catholic bishop of this diocese.'— Quoted in 
T. D. Sullivan's Record, p. 20. 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 155 

his opponent, was an able man — he was known many years 
afterwards, as a man of some social and political prominence 
in London society, as Master of the Queen's Bench and Chair- 
man of the Political Committee of the Reform Club ; but, 
owing to the desertion of his own committee, some of whom 
were the very first to vote for Keogh, Norton resigned during 
the polling-day, and Keogh was returned, the figures standing 
thus : Keogh, 79 ; Norton, 40. 1 

In the meanwhile the same good fortune had not attended 
the other members of the ' Brass Band.' John Sadleir had 

1 It is hard to bring home to the mind of any but an Irish reader the gigantic 
consequences on the future of Ireland which the action of Keogh produced, 
and it is necessarily as hard to understand the fierce hatred which was then and 
ever afterwards felt for him by the Irish people. The following quotation from 
the Nation of the period will perhaps do something to bring home to the reader 
of to-day the ideas, and still more the temper, of the time. It appeared on 
April 23, 1853, and was in reply to Keogh's speech on the hustings at Athlone : 
' Mr. William Keogh has given tongue at last. For five months he has kept the 
silence of conscious infamy, while the whole island has been ringing with his 
shame. For five months the highest and the holiest voices in the land have been 
raised to accuse and to curse him, and he has held his peace. Words that would 
have made an honest man's blood choke him have met his eyes in every paper 
he read, and he has swallowed them without retort. He knew at the time that 
he dare not appear in an assembly of honest Irishmen, or he would be hooted 
from their sight. And he felt still nearer the touch of his own ignominy. In 
the Hall of the Four Courts, at his swearing in, a little gang of political blacklegs 
replaced the crowded array of the bar which used to attend the inauguration of a 
law official of the Crown. As he has driven through the streets of Dublin his 
furtive eye seemed to dread the fall of a dead cat or a shower of rotten eggs. 
For five months of place and power and emolument he has seen hatred and 
contempt of him wherever he turned. To remain silent in such a storm of 
execrations must have been hard for one of his passionate and voluble temper. 
But at last he has uttered himself. At last all the bitterness and anger which 
had been fermenting for five months in his heart have broken loose. And it has 
been like lifting a sluice-gate from a sewer. For hours he spoke, and the words 
rolled in one long gush of impure filth from his lips For hours he spoke, and 
spared neither truth nor decency in his course. Bullying abuse that would demean 
a fishwoman, false scandal, and braggadocio, and dastardly innuendo he used, and 
used without stay or scruple. . . . There is a disease which is the last to feed 
upon a debauchee's bad-tempered frame — when the constitution, rotten to its very 
springs, is only strong enough to secrete vermin, and the unhappy victim lives 
crawling, sick, and ashamed of his own foul existence. By this disease Mr. Keogh 
has chosen to illustrate the way in which he has been recently afflicted. He has 
felt the morbus pedicularis of his own ignominy itching him to the bone, and he 
says that we infected him with it. In an episodical attack upon the Nation, 
meant, we suppose, to be the coarsest and the foulest passage of his harangue, he 



156 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

stood again for Carlow. Like Keogh, he was supported by 
large sums of money and by violent mobs. He got a letter 
from the Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin ' expressing the most 
earnest anxiety ' for his success ; 1 he was backed by the 
priests. One of his mobsmen was requested by the Rev. 
Father Maher to keep quiet and not disgrace 'a good cause.' 2 
In spite of all these influences he was beaten by Mr. Alex- 
ander, the Conservative candidate, by a majority of 6. 

Keogh, though he had won the election at Athlone, was 
not yet safe. The violence of his temper, the unscrupulous 
audacity of some of his acts, his terrible speeches, his desperate 
expedients, had all been made notorious by the utterances of 
the press, and his conduct was brought in various ways be- 
fore Parliament. Gavan Duffy obtained the appointment of a 
committee, known as the ' Corruption Committee,' to investi- 
gate the charges against Keogh and others of having used 
their position to make corrupt promises to obtain situations 
through their influence as members of Parliament. Keogh, 

says that, " unable to slay, and afraid to stab," we have " tried to inflict upon him 
the morbus pedicular is." We thank him for the word. The metaphor is a nasty 
one. It is one we have been loth to apply. But he has invented it, and let it 
stick to him. It completely illustrates a sense of degradation, patent and foul, 
and set in a natural quarantine from all honest men. " Unable to slay " ! What 
does the gentleman mean? His character is dead, decomposed — it stinks. We 
do not estimate how far we have helped to scotch it. Let it rest. But " afraid" ! 
Afraid of what ? Afraid of whom ? We have never hesitated to express the 
greatest contempt for Mr. William Keogh's character when there was occasion. 
We have never put a tooth in anything we had to say about him. We have 
stigmatised his conduct in the very broadest and plainest terms we could find. 
To be " afraid " of him is something too absurd for us to conceive. Afraid of a 
charlatan, afraid of a cheat, afraid of a public profligate and liar upon his oath, 
afraid of the greatest political scamp of his country, and the type par excellence 
of Irish demagogue rascality ! Why, there are some men whem it requres 
courage to differ from and daring to assail. And we believe we have not wanted 
either upon occasion. But this paltry adventurer, who would be nothing were it 
not for his readiness, his flippancy, his contempt of scruples, and his now of 
animal spirits— whose invective is only a deluge of dirt — whose most pretentious 
oratory is a jumble of bog Latin and flatulent English — whose character has been 
the by-word of everybody in this city for years as a sort of political Barnum — and 
whose legal standing is on a level with his ancestral patrimony — the Lord deliver 
us from fear of such a creature as that ! ' — Quoted by T. D. Sullivan, Record, 
pp. 21, 22. 

1 Dublin Evening Post. Quoted by T. D. Sullivan, Record, p. 14. 

12 T. D. Sullivan, Record, p. 15. 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 



*57 



appointed originally a member of this committee, was obliged 
to resign ; the evidence against him became so strong that 
he had to pass from the position of judge to that of accused. 
The facts were notorious in Athlone. As has been seen, his 
wholesale promises of situations were one of many reasons 
why he had been able to overcome all opposition against him 
in the town. Again he escaped by the sheer force of auda- 
cious lying. One of the charges against him was that he had 
induced a Colonel Smith, of Athlone, to lend him 500/. on 
the promise that he would obtain for that gentleman a 
stipendiary magistracy, and that this promise he had failed 
to keep. He denied every one of these charges, declared 
that the money raised by Smith had been raised in the Con- 
servative interest, and not in that of himself personally, and 
represented himself as having remained on terms of intimacy 
with Smith to the day of his death. As a matter of fact, 
Smith was driven to bankruptcy by the failure of Mr. Keogh 
to keep his engagements, bitterly complained of the foul 
treatment he had received, and in the end he had to fly from 
his liabilities to America. 1 

But this was not the most serious attack made upon him. 
The reader will remember the terrible speech in recommenda- 
tion of assassination which he had delivered to the Ribbon- 
men of Westmeath. The Conservative press of Ireland had 
denounced the appointment to a law office of a man capable 
of such a speech just as vehemently as the ' Freeman's Journal ' 
and the ' Nation.' ' No Prime Minister/ wrote the ' Evening 
Mail,' ' ever offered a more audacious insult to his sovereign 
than Lord Aberdeen has done in naming him to be one of 
her Majesty's law officers.' 2 Conservatives took up the same 
position in the House of Lords. On June 10, Lord West- 
meath first drew attention to the assassination speech. He 
quoted the terrible words already mentioned, in which a 
contrast was drawn between the short nights of summer, the 
longer nights of autumn, and the still longer nights of winter, 
with the significant wind-up, ' and then let everyone re- 
member who voted for Sir R. Levinge.' (There are several 

1 T. D. Sullivan's Record, pp. 39, 40. z lb. p. 24. 



158 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

versions of the speech, but they singularly agree in essen- 
tial points.) The Ministerial speakers had nothing to reply 
to this charge ; Lord Aberdeen had heard nothing of them ; 
and the Marquis of Clanricarde did not think this was 
language which the House of Lords should be called upon 
to pay any attention to ! ' 

But the Conservative opposition was not willing to allow 
the Ministry to escape so easily. Lord Derby thought the 
matter did not deserve to be treated so ' lightly.' It was 
a serious matter if such language had been used by a man 
who had been appointed to ' an office of all others in the 
world which was connected with the maintenance of the law 
and the suppression of turbulence and violence in Ireland'; 2 
and Lord Eglinton, who had just ceased to be Lord-Lieu- 
tenant of Ireland, described Keogh, if he used this language, 
as having ' openly recommended assassination.' The lan- 
guage ' could bear no other construction than that he was 
distinctly recommending the people whom he was addressing, 
when the long nights would admit of it, to commit, if not 
murder, the most violent outrages.' 3 

The matter again came up on June 17. The use of the 
words by Keogh was so notorious that even an attempt at 
denial filled everybody with surprise. Two magistrates, the 
rector of Moate, where the speech was made, and three others 
wrote to emphatically declare that they had heard the words 
recommending assassination. A policeman had been sent 
to report the speeches at the meeting. ' I have no more 
doubt,' added the Marquis of Westmeath, 'that the report 
of that constable may be found on the table of the Lord- 
Lieutenant, if he likes to look for it, than that I have now the 
use of my right hand.' 4 But the Duke of Newcastle did not 
produce the report of the constable ; his only defence was a 
letter from Mr. Keogh, in which he did not deny the use of 
the words. He confined himself to the bald statement that 
he had no recollection of having used them ; his recollection 
was confused by a speech that ' did not occupy five minutes/ 
and he trusted to the evidence of friends. Then a letter was 

1 T. D. Sullivan's Record, pp. 24, 25. 2 lb. p. 26. 

3 lb. 4 lb. pp.27, 28. 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 159 

enclosed from a ' friend ' declaring that Keogh had used no 
such language. 1 The ' friend ' was a solicitor named R. C. 
Macnevin, whose timely testimony was afterwards rewarded 
by the Registrarship in the court of Judge Keogh. This was 
assuredly a very weak reply to so grave a charge. As the 
Conservative ' Evening Mail ' put it, ' Mr. Keogh and his 
friends virtually entered a plea of guilty' 2 Lord Eglinton 
pressed home the charge to absolute conviction by further 
declarations. A letter from a magistrate declared that 
' twenty gentlemen of independence and station,' who were 
present on the occasion, were ready to testify to the use of 
the words ' on oath ' ; and then Lord Eglinton summarised 
the case in these vigorous terms : — 

Mr. Keogh's speech was only one amongst many others which 
were brought under my notice. I certainly little expected these 
words had fallen from a man who was to become Solicitor- General 
for Ireland ; but, as I have said, they came before me along with 
hundreds of other such reports and speeches, urging incitements, not 
only to riot, but even to disloyalty. But I confess that during 

THE WHOLE TIME I WAS IN IRELAND, NO WORDS WERE BROUGHT TO 
ME WHICH, IN MY OPINION, SO DISTINCTLY RECOMMENDED ASSASSI- 
NATION. 3 

Several other charges were brought against the new law 
officer. In the assassination speech he was accused of also 
asking the Westmeath ' boys ' to come to Athlone with their 
shillelaghs and to use them, and with having headed himself 
a charge upon the hotel of his opponent. The ' boys ' 
obeyed the command, and the intimidation which the shil- 
lelaghs created was one of the forces which won the election. 
This charge also was boldly denied by Keogh, but it was 
proved beyond any possibility of doubt. 4 Finally, a con- 
troversy arose between him and . Lord Naas (afterwards Earl 
of Mayo) ; Keogh affirming, and Lord Naas positively 
denying, that office had been offered to him by the Conser- 
vative leaders. When challenged for proof, he appealed again 
to the testimony of a friend of his, whom he described as ' a 
gentleman of honour, veracity and high character.' 5 The 

1 T. D. Sullivan's Record, pp. 28, 29. 2 lb. pp. 29, 30. 

3 lb. p. 30. * lb. pp. 32, 33. s lb. p. 45. 



i6c THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

gentleman so described was Mr. Edmund O'Flaherty, of 
whom we shall hear a little more presently. 

Thus Keogh had surmounted all the difficulties that at 
every moment seemed certain of overwhelming him. Success 
for the moment seemed to attend the other members of the 
gang also. Sadleir, defeated for Carlow, cast about for some 
other constituency. The Sligo of those days was not unlike 
the Athlone ; it had the reputation of being among the most 
corrupt boroughs of the country, and it has since been dis- 
franchised. It had been won by an Englishman named 
Townly, but the means of corruption he had employed were 
so open that he had been unseated for bribery, and thus the 
vacancy had been created. Sadleir employed exactly the 
same means as previous aspirants for the representation of the 
place. It was proved afterwards that several of the voters 
received sums running up to 25/. for their votes. Sadleir, 
besides, though he was bitterly opposed by some of the clergy, 
had the support of several of the priests, and was actually 
proposed by a parish priest ; and he had also the advantage 
of the intimidation of those hired mobs which he and Keogh 
had introduced into the factors of Irish electioneering. He 
was returned by a majority of four votes. There was a 
petition ; the bribery was clearly proved ; but, according to 
the loose and shameless customs of the times, the tools were 
convicted while Sadleir was declared innocent. He actually 
retained his seat, and was perhaps in the House at the very 
moment when the Attorney-General moved for leave to 
prosecute some of the men whose bought votes had obtained 
him admission into the House. In 1855, Lord Aberdeen was 
replaced by Lord Palmerston, and Keogh was raised to the 
Attorney-Generalship in place of Mr. Brewster, who, being a 
Peelite, did not think it consistent to accept the change to a 
completely Whig administration. Keogh also had begun life 
as a Peelite ; but, of course, he was not troubled by the subtle 
distinction between one Ministry and another, and gladly 
accepted promotion. He had to seek election once more ; 
but so broken was the spirit of the country that no attempt 
was made to defeat him ; and to add to the tragic complete- 
ness of the situation, Dr. Browne, the ' Dove of Elphin,' came 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 161 

to the hustings and proposed Keogh as ' a fit and proper 
person ' to represent the constituency. 

And thus the triumph of the Irish Brigade was complete. 
All the men who had opposed them were crushed ; some of 
the priests who had taken the true view of the situation were 
harried by their ecclesiastical superiors, or compelled to 
abstain from all action or speech on political matters. 
Frederic Lucas, who brought to the Irish cause a rare spirit 
of self-abnegation, resolved to go to Rome to lay the case at 
the feet of the Pope, and to call for redress and freedom for 
the priests that had endeavoured to avert from Ireland one of 
the greatest disasters and blackest shames of her history. 
But the Pope had received other information, and the mission 
was a failure. Lucas returned to Ireland in breaking health 
and with a broken heart. He never saw again the land of 
his adoption, which he loved so dearly ; he was taken sick on 
his return journey, and died at Staines on October 22, 1855. 
PI is death was taken by the Irish people as a calamity in 
addition to all those already suffered. Shortly afterwards 
another of the band of Tenant Leaguers, who had fought so 
bravely against the traitors, gave up the fight. Gavan Duffy 
despaired of the time. In such a season ' there was/ he said, 
' no more hope for Ireland than for a corpse on the dissecting- 
table.' On November 6, 1855, he sailed for Australia. 

It was at the moment of their complete triumph that 
Nemesis began to fall on the men ' who had destroyed and 
sold the hopes and fortunes of their country. Sadleir was the 
first to meet disaster. At Carlow, one of the agencies he had 
employed most extensively and relentlessly to secure his 
return, were the accounts of the bankrupt shopkeepers with 
the Tipperary banks. It was a favourite plan of his, as of 
other Parliamentary aspirants afterwards, to lend money to 
the voters in the intervals between the elections on renewable 
bills, and with this unpaid bill he always held his power over 
the hapless elector, and could count on his vote when election 
time came. A man named Dowling, an elector of Carlow, 
was suspected of intending to vote against Sadleir, and he 
was arrested for debt on the morning of the election. Dow- 
ling took an action for false imprisonment ; there were many 



i62 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

damaging revelations against Saclleir in the trial, and he had 
to go into the witness-box. He swore boldly and unflinch- 
ingly, and the jury had either to brand him or Dowling a 
perjurer ; the jury gave the verdict for Dowling. The result 
was that Sadleir had, in January 1854, to resign his office as a 
Lord of the Treasury. 

This was the first turn of the tide. In March of the same 
year there began to be rumours that, instead of being a 
millionaire, he was in financial difficulties, but the rumours 
were laughed out of existence. Public confidence had been 
but restored in the financier of the ' Brass Band ' when another 
scandal shook its credit. People began to ask where was 
Mr. Edmund O'Flaherty, the Commissioner of Income Tax. 
This was the ' gentleman of honour, veracity, and high 
character ' whom Keogh had called in proof of his statement 
that Lord Naas, and not he, had lied in reference to the offer 
of office from the Conservatives ; this also was the gentleman 
who had sent round the hat for Keogh at the time when, 
desperate and driven, he was about to stand for Athlone after 
he had accepted the office of Solicitor-General. Before 
many days the whole world knew that the Commissioner of 
Income Tax had fled no one knew whither, and that he had 
left behind bills amounting to 15,000/. in circulation, some of 
them bearing names — Keogh's among the rest — which were 
stated to be forged. 

This flight spread a painful degree of uncertainty in the 
public mind, and people began to ask who would be the next 
to go. The situation was rendered more complicated and 
painful by the fact, which the Opposition papers took care to 
largely advertise, that the absconding O'Flaherty had been 
on terms of the closest intimacy with the Pcelite leaders, and 
had been, beyond doubt, the go-between in the infamous 
bargain by which the Peelites gave office and the ' Irish 
Brigade' sold a country. It was proved that O'Flaherty was 
on visiting terms with the Duke of Newcastle ; a letter of his 
was published addressed to Mr. Richard Swift, M.P., in which 
the subscription was suggested that paid the expenses of 
Keogh for his contest in Athlone ; and in the list of persons 
who had already subscribed, the honoured name of Sidney 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 163 

Herbert with a subscription of 100/. appears side by side with 
that of John Sadleir for the same amount. And finally, the 
fact was notorious that, when Mr. Gladstone extended the 
Income Tax to Ireland, Mr. O'Flaherty received a reward for his 
services from the Peelites by his appointment as Commissioner. 

The thing blew over for a while, and Sadleir once more 
was sailing before the wind. The death of Lucas and the 
departure of Gavan Duffy seemed to complete his triumph, 
and he was everywhere — especially, of course, in England — ■ 
congratulated on the dispersal of his enemies. 

Meantime he was approaching the abyss. The rumours 
were true that he was in financial difficulties. The vast 
schemes in which he had embarked proved in many cases 
disastrous ; then he took to all kinds of expedients for raising 
money ; and finally he resorted to the forgery of title-deeds, 
conveyances, and bills. In February of 1856 the crash came. 
Glyns dishonoured some of the bills of the Tipperary Bank. 
The news spread ; a run took place on some of the branches ; 
but next day it was announced that a mistake had been 
committed, and the drafts were honoured. The crisis might 
be averted if only a little ready money could be obtained. 
' All right,' telegraphed James Sadleir to ' John Sadleir, 
Esq., M.P., Reform Club, London,' ' at all the branches : only 
a few small things refused there. If from twenty to thirty 
thousand over here on Monday morning all is safe.' This 
was received on a Saturday. Sadleir went into the City to 
see a Mr. Wilkinson, with whom he had had large trans- 
actions ; proposed various plans for raising money ; all were 
rejected. ' He then became very excited,' says Mr. Wilkin- 
son, describing the scene afterwards, * put his hand to his 
head, and said, " Good God ! if the Tipperary Bank should 
fail the fault will be entirely mine, and I shall have been the 
ruin of hundreds and thousands." He walked about the 
office in a very excited state, and urged me to try and help 
him, because, he said, he could not live to see the pain and 
ruin inflicted on others by the cessation of the bank. The 
interview ended in this, that I was unable to assist him in his 
plans to raise money.' l 

1 New Ireland, p. 179. 



164 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

As the day went on, Sadleir heard news more disastrous. 
Mr. Wilkinson had previously lent him large sums of money. 
The money had been lent on one of the many securities 
Sadleir had forged during the previous year, and the sus- 
picions of Mr. Wilkinson having been aroused, he had sent 
over his partner, Mr. Stevens, to Dublin to inquire into the 
matter. This was probably a portion of the news which was 
brought to Sadleir at ten o'clock on the night of this eventful 
Saturday by Mr. Norris, solicitor, of Bedford Row, one of his 
intimate friends. The two talked over the situation. It was 
agreed that there was no help for it, and that on Monday the 
Tipperary Bank must stop payment. At half-past ten Mr. 
Norris left. Then Sadleir spent some time in writing letters. 
He then got up. As he passed through the hall, and was 
taking his hat from the stand, he met his butler, told him not 
to stay up for him, and then shut the door with a firm hand. 
As he left it was just striking twelve ; it was Sunday morning. 
The next morning, on a mound in Hampstead Heath, the 
passers-by observed a gentleman lying as if asleep. A silver 
tankard smelling strongly of prussic acid was at his side. It 
was the dead body of John Sadleir — dead by his own hand. 

'On Monday,' writes A. M. Sullivan, 1 'the news flashed through 
the kingdom. There was alarm in London ; there was wild panic in 
Ireland. The Tipperary Bank closed its doors ; the country people 
flocked into the towns. They surrounded and attacked the branches ; 
the poor victims imagined their money must be within, and they got 
crowbars, picks, and spades to force the walls and "dig it out." The 
scenes of mad despair which the streets of Thurles and Tipperary 
saw that day would melt a heart of adamant. Old men went about 
like maniacs, confused and hysterical ; widows knelt in the street 
and, aloud, asked God was it true they were beggared for ever. 
Even the poor-law unions, which had kept their accounts in the 
bank, lost all, and had not a shilling to buy the pauper's dinner the 
day the branch doors closed. . . . Banks, railways, assurance asso- 
ciations, land companies, every undertaking with which he had been 
connected, were flung into dismay ; and for months fresh revelations 
of fraud, forgery, and robbery came daily and hourly to view. By 
the month of April the total of such discoveries had reached 
1,250.000/. ! ' 

1 New Ireland, pp. 180, 181. 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 165 

' Considerably above the middle height,' Sadleir is de- 
scribed by one who knew him ; 'his figure was youthful, but 
his face — that was indeed remarkable. Strongly marked, 
sallow, eyes and hair intensely black, and the lines of the 
mouth worn into deep channels.' 2 

O'Flaherty fled ; Sadleir dead ; how was it, meantime, 
with Keogh ? His name had been coupled with Sadleir and 
with Edmund O'Flaherty in the most intimate political asso- 
ciation for nearly six years ; was he going to be exposed also 
and to choose flight or death in preference to shame and ex- 
posure ? There was no such fate in store for him. It was 
reported that he was going to be raised to the bench ! At 
once the national press of Ireland protested against this last 
indignity upon the country. 

' Mr. William Keogh a judge ! ' wrote the ' Nation ' at an earlier 
period, when the report was first circulated, ' with life and death on 
his hands ; with the peace, and honour, and property of the com- 
munity hanging on the breath of his lips ; with the liberties and the 
safeguards of society under his direct control. Mr. William Keogh, 
with the antecedents of his unprincipled political career, his mediocre 
professional character, his false pledges, his disreputable associates ; 
this gentleman a judge ! And the youngest judge, and the judge of 
the least standing at the bar, who has mounted the Irish bench within 
the memory of living man. We hesitate to believe it can be possible.' 2 

Then it spoke of the other judges on the bench, condemn- 
ing their political partisanship, but admitting their professional 
claims and their personal integrity. 

'There is not a man among them,' it went on, 'who has solemnly 
called God to witness a pledge of public conduct — who has ratified 
that pledge after months of mature consideration with another 
equally solemn — and who has scandalously broken both. There is 
not a man among them who, within seven years of public life, has 
been a Tory, a Whig, a Catholic Conservative, an anti-Repealer, an 
Ultramontane Radical, and a Tenant Leaguer — who has written 
pamphlets and spoken speeches on every side of every question, and 
tried the cushions of every bench in the House of Commons. 
There is none of them who need fear, when he takes up an indict- 
ment for forgery, that he will find the name of his bosom friend at its 

1 New Ireland, p. iSo. 2 T. D. Sullivan, Record, pp. 46, 47. 



166 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

head — the name of the man upon whose word of honour he relied, 
and sustained himself in a position compromising his own political 
character. There is none of them who, when the officer of justice 
administers the oath of evidence before him, need blush, as the 
words " So help me God " are uttered, to think how that most solemn 
of human adjurations could not bind even him, a judge of the land, 
to the truth.' l 

When after the death of John Sadleir the rumours were 
again resumed : 

' It is very generally supposed,' wrote the ' Nation,' ' that, after the 
scandalous conduct of Mr. Edmund O'Flaherty, the hideous suicide 
of Mr. John Sadleir, Government may feel a difficulty in elevating 
to the ermine of a justice a gentleman who was so intimately iden- 
tified with both in their political profligacies, and who had, indeed, 
rather a worse public character than either.' 2 

' Can such a profanation be possible ?' asked the 'Wexford People.' 
' Can public decency be so outraged ? . . . We believe the Govern- 
ment of Lord Palmerston is capable of doing a large amount of 
iniquity ; but there is a limit beyond which they dare not pass, or 
the whole world would cry shame on them, and this is one.' 3 

' It was in the month of March, 1856,' writes T. D. Sulli- 
van, 4 ' that these protests, and scores of others such as these 
against the probable elevation of Mr. Keogh to the bench of 
justice, were being published. The papers at the time were 
being loaded with the details of the Sadleir forgeries and 
swindles ; the law courts were glutted with trials, motions, 
and all sorts of proceedings arising out of them ; the air was 
ringing with the cries of the unfortunate people who were 
reduced from a state of solvency and comfort to one of 
pauperism by the Sadleirite plunder. It was little wonder 
that the bare idea of the advancement of Mr. Keogh to the 
bench at such a time should have caused in the minds of 
honest men almost a frenzy of pain and horror. 

The protests were in vain. The death of Judge Torrens 
was announced in the Dublin papers of the morning of 
Tuesday, April 1. On Wednesday, April 2 — the day after 
— Keogh had obtained the vacancy, and was one of Her 
Majesty's judges. 

1 T. D. Sullivan's Record, p. 47. 2 lb. p. 53 

5 lb. * lb. p. 54. 



THE GREAT BETRAYAL 167 

'The administration of justice in Ireland,' said the 'Nation,' 'has 
sustained a most grievous disgrace — a disgrace which would not be 
tolerated by the bench, by the bar, or the people of any other 
country on the face of the earth. . . . Fancy the effect of Mr. 
William Keogh going judge of assize to try the Westmeath Ribbon- 
men whom he incited to midnight violence — trying perjury in 
Athlone or Cork, before whole communities who heard him swear 
the oath of whose breach his presence on the bench before them is 
the startling evidence ! It is an example sufficient to disgust or to 
demoralise the whole profession, and shake faith in justice. . . . 
What a startling and a scandalous spectacle it is to see this man, yet 
young — every year of whose life has been marked by infamous 
political tergiversation, whose career has never had in it a day of 
that patient, arduous, and laborious effort which is the peculiar 
dignity of the forensic robe, but has been like the advance of the 
chamois-hunter, springing from peak to peak, and always on the 
point of toppling over — now, after having been everything by turns 
and nothing long, broken faith with every party and laughed at every 
principle, set in ermine over this city, a judge among the twelve 
judges of the land ! ' 

' Well may it be asked,' continues the national journal in the 
same article, ' Has God's providence ceased to rule in Ireland?' 1 

There is one scene more in this episode of Irish history. 
One prominent member of the ' Irish Brigade ' had not been 
made a judge or committed suicide. It was James Sadleir, 
brother of John. On February 16, 1857, Mr. J. D. Fitzgerald, 
then Attorney-General for Ireland, moved the expulsion of 
James Sadleir for having fled before charges of fraud ; and 
the motion was carried, nemine contradicente. 

An Englishman was lamenting, a short time ago, to a 
brilliant Irishman who had formerly sat in Parliament, the 
disagreeable contrast between the Irish members of former 
days and the unpleasant specimens of the present hour. 
The Irishman surprised his interlocutor by admitting the 
contrast, but not after the same fashion. Then he put thus 
tersely the story which has just been told : ' There were 
four members of Parliament, personal intimates and political 
associates. One was a forger and committed suicide ; the 
other was a forger, and was expelled from Parliament ; the third 
was a swindler and fled ; and the fourth was made a judge.' 

1 T. D. Sullivan's Record, pp. 56, 57. 



168 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



CHAPTER VI. 

RUIN AND RABAGAS. 

The years which followed the treason of Judge Keogh are 
among the darkest in Irish history. The British Government 
and the landlords saw their power once more unquestioned 
by popular leaders and unopposed by popular organisation or 
popular hopes. The landlords took advantage of the situa- 
tion after their usual fashion. 

And here again I must pause in the narrative to add 
another chapter to the long and monotonous history of the 
land question. The oppression which the landlords practised 
on their tenants at this period knew no limit of age or sex or 
circumstance ; it penetrated into the smallest as well as the 
largest affairs of the tenant's life. The rent was raised year 
by year, the landlord knowing no other limit to his exactions 
than those of his own appetites or caprice or wants. The 
building of a new mansion in London, a bad night at the 
card-table, the demands of generous and exacting beauty, or 
the loss of a great race, remote as they were from the con- 
cerns of the Irish farmer in his cabin and on his patch of 
land, influenced and darkened his destiny ; and year after year 
his rent steadily kept rising. When at last successive genera- 
tions of folly and vice swept the old landlord . into the mael- 
strom of debt, the change of landlord meant in nearly every 
case a rise of rent and a master — penurious, perhaps, where 
the old proprietor had been spendthrift, but as grinding 
and as greedy. 

There was in connection with most of the properties a 
code for the regulation of the tenantry which went under the 
name of ' office rules.' These rules dogged every action of 
the tenant's life. 

A minute system of fines existed. Take these for in- 



RUiN AND RABAGAS 169 

stances : William Bewley, a tenant on one of the estates of 
Lord Leitrim, was fined 1 1/. because he sold hay contrary to 
the rules of the estate ; Lord Leitrim himself visited this 
man's house in order to find fault with him, and the sight of 
this dreaded landlord and his brutal language drove Bewley's 
daughter insane. The widowed mother of the Rev. Mr. 
.Lavelle, a well-known Catholic priest, was evicted because, 
contrary to the rules of the estate, she took in her son-in-law 
and daughter for companionship. A tenant on Lord Lucan's 
estate was find ios. for being three days late in the pay- 
ment of his rent, and another tenant was fined 14s. Sd. for 
receiving a tenant's daughter into his house while her hus- 
band was in England. On the Ormsby estate in County 
Mayo this system of petty fining reached its highest develop- 
ment. Thus a woman named Ann Cassidy could recall the 
infliction of the following fines upon her husband : $s. for 
being absent from duty work one day ; ios. for a similar 
offence ; 2s. 6d. for being absent from duty work on the day 
of his child's burial ; 2s. 6d. because a pig rooted part of his 
land ; 2s. 6d. for allowing an ass to stray on the road ; 
ios. 6d. because the top stone of a gable was not rightly 
whitewashed. James Sheerin, formerly a tenant on the 
Ormsby estate, was fined ios. for cutting a branch from an 
ash-tree which he himself had planted ; $s. because a pig 
strayed back into a house from which he had been evicted , 
and is. 6d. because a horse was allowed out on the road. 
Margaret Conlon describes how, on the same estate, her 
husband was fined Js. 6d. for not making a drain at a time 
when he was engaged in mowing for the landlord ; 12s. 6d. for 
changing a window from one side of the house to the other 
in order to get more light, and 2s. 6d. for being too late at his 
work. Charles Durkin, a tenant on the estate of Sir Robert 
•Blosse, was fined for taking carts of bog mud from one part of 
his land to manure another, and 2/. ijs. 6d. for cutting loads 
of turf from a bog for which he was paying il. 8s. per acre. 1 

1 These cases were supplied to the solicitors for the traversers in the case of 
the Queen v. Parnell and others by persons who were prepared to swear to their 
occurrence. The briefs containing this evidence were placed at my disposal by 
the widow of A. M. Sullivan. It will be referred to as ' Evidence for Queen v. 
Parnell. ' 



170 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Thus beggared and driven, the tenant naturally took 
refuge or found some consolation in the contemplation of his 
religion, which promised a future life in which the poverty 
and tyranny of this world would exist no more, and where 
hearts would find peace and sorrow could dry its tears. But 
even the poor luxury of his intercourse with the Unseen the 
landlord would not permit the tenant to enjoy in peace. 
Lord Plunket, for instance, evicted a large number of his 
tenants because they refused to send their children to the 
proselytising schools. This system of proselytising was one 
of the worst portents of the time. A society was formed, and 
is still in existence, the nominal purpose of which is to wean 
the Catholic population from the errors of their religion by 
lectures. Under this organisation, known as the Irish Church 
Mission, the Catholics of Ireland have the privilege of seeing 
in the streets on public placards the most flagrant reflections 
on the most sacred mysteries of their creed. In the poorer 
parts of the country, food was the bribe by which the starving 
parents were seduced into selling the creed of their children. 
During periods of very deep distress these missions enrolled 
some of the population, but the return of such prosperity as 
the Irish farmer was allowed to enjoy, brought back the 
people to the observance of the faith in which they believed. 
In some parts of the country the small churches which at one 
time had congregations of Catholics converted by such means, 
are now empty and in ruins. The parents who thus deserted 
their religion naturally became the objects of their neigh- 
bours' contempt. They and their tempters were called by 
a nickname which sufficiently indicated the reason of their 
change of faith. ' Souper ' is one of the vilest epithets that 
one person in Ireland can hurl at another, even up to the 
present hour. In another way also the landlords substituted 
a penal code of their, own for that abolished by statute. On. 
several estates every effort was directed towards expelling 
the Catholic population so as to replace them by Protestant 
tenants. 

It might have been expected that the tenant thus reduced 
to an ill-paid labourer, as absolutely dependent as a serf, 
would not be an object of any further misgiving or annoy- 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 171 

ance to his landlord. But the frenzy for the destruction of 
the people that set in towards the beginning of the century 
seemed still to rage like an unholy and accursed mania in 
the souls of the landlords ; and the period is marked by 
wholesale clearances on a scale that is appalling, and amid 
circumstances of horror and cruelty that are scarcely credible. 

The instances are so numerous of such wholesale clear- 
ances that one has to pick and choose. It will suffice to 
take out a few of the typical cases ; they will indicate what 
landlordism meant in those days. 

Five names stand out in bold relief among the wholesale 
evictors of this and other periods and that immediately 
preceding it. These are the Marquis of Sligo, the Earl of 
Lucan, Mr. Allan Pollock, Lord Leitrim, and Mr. John 
George Adair. The Marquis of Sligo cleared out at various 
periods no fewer than two thousand families, with the result 
that a single tenant of his, with a few herds, occupied an area 
of no less than two hundred square miles. The Earl of Lucan 
absolutely swept from the earth the town of Aughadrina. 
Mr. Pollock evicted one hundred families from one estate, fifty 
from another. He was a Scotchman, and one of the objects 
of these wholesale evictions was to replace the Irish popula- 
tion by men of another race, and the tenantry by sheep and 
bullocks. ' Before the face of this " stranger " no less than 
five thousand souls had to fly the bounds of their country 
and their sweet fields.' l In 1856 Mrs. James Blake evicted 
fifty families, not one of whom owed her a penny of rent, and 
the land was changed into grass land. ' Some of the tenants 
then evicted are beggars in Loughrea,' says Dr. Duggan. 2 
In County Cavan seven hundred tenants were turned out by 
Messrs. O'Connor and Malone in the course of two days. In 
County Meath Mr. Nicholson cleared out from eighty to one 
hundred people in 1862, and about three hundred persons 
in 1869-70, and the land was entirely turned into pasture. 
In 1857 Mr. Rochford Boyd, a Westmeath landlord, evicted 
a large number of tenants, not one of them owing any rent. 

Wholesale eviction of this kind could not be carried on, 

1 Lavelle's Irish Landlord since the Revolution, p. 271. 

2 Evidence for Queen v. Parnell. 



172 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of course, without terrible hardship. Sometimes people were 
turned out on Christmas Eve. Here is a case described by 
Father Lavelle. 'A certain landlord in County Galway got 
a cheap decree at quarter sessions against a tenant on his 
property. This was early in October ; October and Novem- 
ber passed over, and a gleam of hope began to enter the 
poor man's soul that, at least, he would be permitted to pass 
the Christmas holidays in his old home. December was fast 
running out ; the sun of Christmas Eve had actually risen, 
and with it the poor man and his wife and family, when, 
horror of horrors ! whom does he see approaching his cabin 
door, followed by a posse comitatus of the Crow-bar Brigade, 
but the sheriff surrounded by a detachment of the con- 
stabulary force ! The family were flung out like vermin, and 
the work of demolition occupied but a few minutes. The 
evicted family passed that and the subsequent Christmas 
night with no other covering but that of the wide canopy of 
heaven, as strict prohibitions had been issued to all the other 
tenants to harbour him on pain of similar treatment' 1 

Father White, of Milltown-Malbay, tells how, in the winter 
of 1864 or 1865, he was present at the eviction of five or six 
families on Mr. Westby's estate in the parish of Carrigaholt. 
It was late in the evening of a cold winter's day ; the bailiffs 
were in the act of carrying out an old woman about eighty 
years of age, and apparently in a dying state. She had been 
it seemed taken from her bed, being wrapped in a sheet. 
They laid her on the dunghill. i I was so shocked that I 
threatened to prosecute the sub-sheriff for murder if she died,' 
says Father White. 2 The eviction of each of these tenants 
was carried out in the most heartless manner. The houses were 
nearly all afterwards unroofed. These tenants, until the bad 
years of 1 862-3-4, were all comfortable and well-to-do. They 
held from five to forty acres. 

' Whilst in Newmarket parish,' says the same clergyman, 
'about 1872 Lord Inchiquin raised the tenants' rents con- 
siderably — I believe added about 5,000/. to his rental. He 



1 Lavelle, pp. 271, 272. 

2 Evidence for Queen v. Parnell. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 173 

evicted a number of tenants, not owing a penny rent, for the 
purpose of adding to his demesne.' 

At an eviction in 1854 on a property under the manage- 
ment of a Marcus Keane, James O'Gorman, one of the tenants 
evicted, died on the roadside. His wife and ten children were 
sent to the workhouse, where they died shortly afterwards. 
John Corbet, a tenant on another townland, was evicted by 
the same agent. He died on the roadside ; his wife had died 
previously to the eviction ; his ten children were sent into 
the workhouse and there died. Michael McMahon, evicted 
at the same time, was dragged out of bed to the wall-side, 
where he died of want next day. His wife died of want 
previously to the eviction, and his children, eight in number, 
died in a few weeks in the workhouse. 1 

1 Though it does not belong to this period, it may be well to quote here 
a description of an eviction which has become historical. The eye-witness to it 
was the Most Rev. Dr. Nulty, Lord Bishop of Meath, and the event occurred in 
September 1847 near Mount Nugent, Co. Cavan. The names of the owners of 
the property were O'Connor and Malone ; that of the agent was Mr. Guiness, 
then M. P. for Kinsale, but shortly afterwards unseated for bribery. Dr. Nulty 
says : — 

' In the very first year of our ministry, as a Missionary Priest in this diocese, 
we were an eye-witness of a cruel and inhuman eviction, which even still makes 
our heart bleed as of en as we allow ourselves to think of it. 

' Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day and 
set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, 
probably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them. And we 
remember well that there was not a single shilling of rent due on the estate at 
the time, except by one man ; and 'the character and acts of that man made it 
perfectly clear that the agent and himself quite understood each other. 

' The Crow-bar Brigade, employed on the occasion to extinguish the hearths 
and demolish the homts of honest, industrious men, worked away with a will at 
their awful calling until evening. At length an incident occurred that varied the 
monotony of the grim, ghastly ruin which they were spreading all around. They 
stopped suddenly, and recoiled panic-stricken with terror from two dwellings 
which they were directed to destroy with the rest. They had just learned that 
a frightful typhus fever held those houses in its grasp, and had already brought 
pestilence and death to their inmates. They therefore supplicated the agent to 
spare these houses a little longer ; but the agent was inexorable, and insisted 
that the houses should come down. The ingenuity with which he extricated 
himself from the difficulties of the situation was characteristic alike of the heart- 
lessness of the man and of the cruel necessities of the work in which he was 
engaged. He ordered a large winnowing-sheet to be secured over the beds in 
which the fever victims lay — fortunately they happened to be perfectly delirious 
at the time- and then directed the houses to be unroofed cautiously and slowly, 



174 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

In one estate at least an ' office rule ' regulated even the 
marriage relations of the tenantry. One of the estates cr. 
which this practice was most rigidly carried out was that of 
the Marquis of Lansdowne. The late Sir John Gray, in a 
speech in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester (October 18, 
1869), describes this episode of landlord life in these graphic 
terms : 1 

In the book he had already quoted from — ' Realities of Irish 
Life ' — there was told a very pathetic story of ' Mary Shea,' the pretty 
black-eyed girl of seventeen, who lived with her parents on a moun- 
tain farm. Mr. Trench tells with touching pathos how, when the 
' hunger ' — the name given by the people to the famine — came, 
Mary's mother died, and was buried in the garden, because Mary 
and her father had not strength to carry her to the churchyard. He 
tells how Mary smothered the bees she had reared herself, though 
they, all knew her well, and sold their store of honey for 15^., and 

"because," he said, "he very much disliked the bother and discomfort of a 
coroner's inquest." I administered the last sacrament cf the Church to four of 
these fever victims next clay ; and, save the above-mentioned winnowing-sheet, 
there was not then a i-oof nearer to me than the canopy of heaven. 

' The horrid scenes I then witnessed I must remember all my life long. The 
wailing of women— the screams, the terror, the consternation of children — the 
speechless agony of honest, industrious men — wrung tears of grief from all who 
saw them. I saw the officers and men of a large police force, who were obliged 
to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of 
the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the 
least resistance. The heavy rains that usually attend the autumnal equinoxes 
descended in cold, copious torrents throughout the night, and at once revealed 
to those houseless sufferers the awful, realities of their condition. I visited them 
next morning, and rode from place to place administering to them all the comfort 
and consolation I could. The appearance of men, women, and children, as they 
emerged from the ruins of their former homes — saturated with rain, blackened 
and besmeared with soot, shivering in every member from cold and misery — 
presented positively the most appalling spectacle I ever looked at. The landed 
proprietors in a circle all around — and for many miles in every direction — warned 
their tenantry, with threats of their direst vengeance, against the humanity of 
extending 10 any of them the hospitality of a single night's shelter. Many of 
these poor people were unable to emigrate with their families ; while, at home, 
the hand of every man was thus raised against them. They were driven from 
the land on which Providence had placed them ; and, in the state of society 
surrounding them, every other walk of life was rigidly closed against them. 
What was the result ? After battling in vain with privation and pestilence, they 
at last graduated from the workhouse to the tomb ; and in little more than three 
years, nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their graves.' 

1 Authorised report, pp. 28-30. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 175 

bought meal, and kept her father alive for a month, but how, when 
it was exhausted, her father died too, and how he, too, was buried in 
the garden by herself and ' Eugene,' and how, thus left an orphan 
and alone, the kind-hearted Eugene took home ' Mary Shea ' to his 
mother's house and shared the scanty meal with her. Mr. Trench 
with great power described, in the book he held in his hand, this sad 
' reality,' and told how, when walking one day through his pleasure- 
grounds, he saw two bright spots shining from behind a holly-tree, 
and coming nearer he saw that behind the tree something moved, 
and forth came Mary Shea, the graceful Irish maiden of seventeen 
with Spanish face, and almost kneeling, she said with blushing confi- 
dence : ' Please, your honour, will you put Eugene's name on the 
book instead of mine.' Then a beautiful tale was told of Mary's 
woes, of her modesty, of her beauty, and of her marriage, on perusing 
which no English matron or noble maiden with tender or womanly 
heart could restrain their tears, so sweetly was told the affecting 
story of Mary Shea. But alas ! Mr. Trench did not tell the dismal 
truth of landlord tyranny that was concealed behind the rose-tinted 
romance of this 'reality of Irish life ; ' he did not tell why it was 
that this blushing maiden of seventeen, the black-eyed Mary Shea, 
came to him, a man she had never before seen, to tell of her innocent 
love, and to introduce Eugene ; he did not tell that by 'the rule of 
the estate,' had Mary Shea or any other tenant dared to get married 
without the leave of ' his honour ' the agent, she would be hurled 
from her farm and the roof torn down about her bridal-bed (cries of 
' Shame on him ! ' and loud cheers). He (Sir John Gray) would now 
read for them an extract from a petition to a noble marquis whose 
name was given in the title-page of Mr. Trench's book as one of 
those nobles whose agent he is, which would tell some of the true 
realities of Irish life ; for these were realities of Irish life of which no 
glimpse was given in Mr. Trench's book. In the title-page of that 
book it would be found that the author, Mr. Trench, was agent to a 
noble marquis and two other great estated persons in Ireland, and in 
M. Perraud's 'Ireland in 1862,' he found a copy of a petition pre- 
sented no farther back than 1858, by the whole body of the tenantry 
of the noble marquis, who was, he believed, the landlord of black- 
eyed Mary Shea (cries of ' Name, name '). The name of the land- 
lord was the Marquis of Lansdowne, the estate was in Kerry, and 
this was the petition : — 

' We (the tenants) have been made keenly sensible of this abject 
dependence by certain rules and regulations which are now forced on 
this estate. By these rules no tenant can marry, or procure the 



176 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

marriage of his son or daughter, without permission from your lord- 
ship's agent, even when no change of tenancy would arise ' (Cheers, 
and loud cries of ' Shame '). That was the petition of the tenantry 
of Lord Lansdowne in April 1858. 

The Lansdowne property brought another of the many 
' rules ' on estates over Ireland to its logical and tragic con- 
clusion. Again the words of Sir John Gray will be quoted : — 

He would now ask leave to read, not from the petition of the 
tenantry but from the judgment of the Chief Baron of the Irish Court 
of Exchequer, another illustration of the 'rule of the estate,' which 
forbade a tenant to give shelter even to a relative in his most dire 
distress upon that very same property. Passing sentence upon some 
persons in the dock who were accused of the manslaughter of a boy 
of twelve years of age, Chief Baron Pigott said : ' The poor boy 
whose death you caused was between twelve and fourteen years of 
age.' Now mark the history of that boy, as told by the Chief Baron : 
1 His mother at one time held a little dwelling from which she was 
expelled. His father was dead. His mother had left him, and he 
was alone and unprotected. He found refuge with his grandmother, 
who held a little farm, from which she was removed in consequence of 
her harbouring this poor boy, as the agent of the property had given 
public notice to the tenantry that expulsion from their farms would 
be the penalty inflicted upon them if they harboured any persons 
having no residence on the estate.' These two cases, not of eviction, 
but cases where eviction did not occur, showed that the tenantry 
were, because of the extraordinary powers conferred by law on land- 
lords, in such a state of serfdom, that the mother could not receive 
her daughter — that the grandmother could not receive her own 
grandchild unless that child was a tenant on the estate (' Shame,' 
'Inhuman') — and the result in the case he was referring to. . . . 
was this, that the poor boy, without a house to shelter him, was 
sought to be forced into the house of a relative in a terrible night of 
storm and rain. He was immediately pushed out again, he staggered 
on a little, fell to the ground, and the next morning was found cold, 
stiff and dead (sensation). The persons who drove the poor boy 
out were tried for the offence of being accessories to his death, and 
their defence was, that what they did was done under the terror of 
' the rule of the estate,' and that they meant no harm to the boy. 
(' Shame.') > 

1 Authorised report, pp. 30, 31. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 177 

Finally, on this point there were cases in which the land- 
lord made even harder claims. The droit de seigneur reigned 
as completely in Ireland as in France, but while in the one 
case it ended with the French Revolution, it endured in 
Ireland — thanks to British rule — until our own times. Lord 
Leitrim in this way, as in many others, raged like a plague 
over the people whom a hideous destiny and evil laws left 
entirely at his mercy. On his estates a comely girl was 
ordered to come nominally as a domestic servant inside his 
house. The house became a prison, and the service was the 
service of shame. In due time the lord of the seraglio sent 
the distasteful mistress to America, and to some other hapless 
girl on his estate the dread choice was offered between 
entering the harem or exposing her parents and her family to 
eviction, i.e. starvation. 

Such are a few instances, selected out from hundreds, of 
what landlordism meant for Ireland during the years between 
the treason of Keogh and the year 1865. To complete the 
picture it is necessary to describe in some detail one other 
eviction scene, which, from its peculiar cruelty, attracted 
universal attention. The story of Glenveigh has been told 
often since, not merely in history, but in romance. Derry- 
veigh is situate in the highlands of Donegal, and has some of 
the most beautiful scenery in Ireland. The beauty of its 
scenery attracted the attention of Mr. John George Adair, a 
Queen's County landlord, while on a sporting visit to the 
locality, and he resolved to buy the property. Up to this 
period the population enjoyed a universal reputation for the 
virtues associated usually with remote mountaineers. They 
were quiet, industrious, and on excellent terms with their 
landlords. The advent of Mr. Adair changed all this. The 
struggle between him and his tenants began in a small 
dispute about his right to shoot over some land formerly in 
the possession of one of their landlords. The farmers at- 
tempted to prevent Mr. Adair shooting ; there was a scuffle ; 
litigation ensued with varying success, and with increasing 
bitterness between Mr. Adair and one of the tenants. A 
further cause of dispute arose soon after. Mr. Adair had, 
like some other of the landlords, imported a number of 



158 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Scotch black-faced sheep, which were supposed to be a very 
profitable investment. These sheep disappeared in consider- 
able numbers ; Mr. Adair charged his tenants with having 
maliciously destroyed them, and succeeded for a while in 
obtaining large sums in compensation from the grand jury. 
These taxes fell very heavily upon the tenantry, and tended 
to exasperate feeling still further. It was represented, too, 
that as the sheep only cost Js. 6d. to 10s. a head, the amount 
claimed at the presentments was from ijs. 6d. to 2$s. a head. 
The Judge of Assize — the late Chief Justice Monahan - 
indignantly refused to fiat these monstrous claims, and an 
impression began to prevail that the disappearance of many 
of the sheep at least was due, not to malice, but to the stress 
of weather. 

This, however, was not the view taken by Mr. Adair. He 
had been exasperated so much by the quarrel over the rights 
of sporting and the disappearance of the sheep, that he came 
to regard himself as engaged in a fierce and merciless struggle 
with the tenantry. He had prepared for such a struggle by 
getting possession of the entire district by purchase at dif- 
ferent but closely following dates, and he was in the end the 
absolute master of ninety square miles of country. Several 
small acts led up to a final cause of quarrel. Two of his 
dogs were poisoned, as he thought maliciously, although the 
grand jury refused him compensation, and an outhouse was 
set on fire. Finally, one of his herds was murdered. This 
fixed Mr. Adair's determination : the banishment of the 
whole population — nothing less would feed fat his big 
revenge. 

The tenantry heard of this fell intention, but, removed 
from much contact with the outside world, and unable to face 
even in imagination such a terrible possibility, they went on 
without taking any particular notice. But they were the only 
persons who were undisturbed. The other landlords, alarmed 
at the transformation of the country from its normal tran- 
quillity into all this tumult of conflict, passed a strong resolu- 
tion in favour of the tenantry ; the clergymen of all denomin- 
ations were as vehemently on their side ; the local authorities 
were loud in their anger. ' Is it my duty,' wrote Mr. Dillon, 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 179 

the resident magistrate, to Sir Thomas Larcom, then Under 
Secretary at Dublin Castle, ' to stand by and give protection 
while the houses are being levelled ? ' In Dublin Castle itself 
they were in a fever of apprehension, and they made prepara- 
tions for assisting the landlord in this act of brutal and 
wholesale cruelty as extensive as if they were preparing for a 
small campaign. Mr. Adair's bailiffs were supplied with the 
services of a large number of soldiers and police. On the 
night of Sunday this body took possession quietly and 
without any warning of all the approaches to the valley in 
which the doomed people slept ; on the following morning — 
Monday, April 8 — the work of eviction began. The ' Deny 
Standard,' a Presbyterian journal of the district, described 
through its special correspondent what followed :— 

' The first eviction was one peculiarly distressing, and the terrible 
reality of the law suddenly burst with surprise on the spectators. 
Having arrived at Lough Barra, the police were halted, and the sheriff, 
with a small escort, proceeded to the house of a widow named 
M 'Award, aged sixty years, living with whom were six daughters and 
a son. Long before the house was reached loud cries were heard 
piercing the air, and soon the figures of the poor widow and her. 
daughters were observed outside the house, where they gave vent to 
their grief in strains of touching agony. Forced to discharge an 
unpleasant duty, the sheriff entered the house and delivered up 
possession to Mr. Adair's steward, whereupon six men, who had been 
brought from a distance, immediately fell to to level the house to 
the ground. The scene then became indescribable. The bereaved 
widow and her daughters were frantic with despair. Throwing them- 
selves on the ground they became almost insensible, and, bursting 
out in the old Irish wail — then heard by many for the first time — 
their terrifying cries resounded along the mountainside for many 
miles. They had been deprived of the little spot made dear to them 
by associations of the past — and with bleak poverty before them, and 
only the blue sky to shelter them, they naturally lost all hope, and 
those who witnessed their agony will never forget the sight. No one 
could stand by unmoved. Every heart was touched, and tears of 
sympathy flowed from many. In a short time we withdrew from the 
scene, leaving the widow and her orphans surrounded by a small 
group of neighbours who could only express their sympathy for the 
homeless, without possessing the power to relieve them. During 
that and the next two days the entire holdings in the land mentioned 



180 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

above were visited, and it was not until an advanced hour on 
Wednesday the evictions were finished. In all the evictions the 
distress of the poor people was equal to that depicted in the first case. 
Dearly did they cling to their homes till the last moment, and while 
the male population bestirred themselves in clearing the houses of 
what scanty furniture they contained, the women and children re- 
mained within till the sheriff's bailiff warned them out, and even 
then it was with difficulty they could tear themselves away from the 
scenes of happier days. In many cases they bade an affectionate 
adieu to their former peaceable but now desolate homes. One old 
man, near the fourscore years and ten, on leaving his house for the last 
time reverently kissed the doorposts, with all the impassioned tenderness 
of an emigrant leaving his native land. His wife and children fol- 
lowed his example, and in agonised silence the afflicted family stood 
by and watched the destruction of their dwelling. In another case 
an old man, aged ninety, who was lying ill in bed, was brought out 
of the house in order that formal possession might be taken, but 
readmitted for a week to permit of his removal. In nearly every 
house there was some one far advanced in age — many of them 
tottering to the grave— while the sobs of helpless children took hold 
of every heart. When dispossessed, the families grouped themselves 
on the ground, beside the ruins of their late homes, having no place 
of refuge near. The dumb animals refused to leave the wallsteads, 
and in some cases were with difficulty rescued from the falling 
timbers. As night set in the scene became fearfully sad. Passing 
along the base of the mountain the spectator might have observed 
near to each house its former inmates crouching round a turf fire, 
close by a hedge ; and as a drizzling rain poured upon them they 
found no cover, and were entirely exposed to it, but only sought to 
warm their famished bodies. Many of them were but miserably 
clad, and on all sides the greatest desolation was apparent. I 
learned afterwards that the great majority of them lay out all night, 
either behind the hedges or in a little wood which skirts the lake ; 
they had no other alternative. I believe many of them intend 
resorting to the poorhouse. There these poor starving people remain 
on the cold bleak mountains, no one caring for them whether they 
live or die. 'Tis horrible to think of, but more horrible to behold.' l 

This tragedy excited the attention of many people. An 
appeal was made for assistance, and the appeal was signed in 
a province unfortunately remarkable for religious dissension 

1 Quoted in New Ireland, pp. 227, 22S. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 181 

by the Catholic bishop, the Protestant rector, the Presby- 
terian minister, and the Catholic parish priest of the district, 
who united in warm deience of the people against their land- 
lord. In Australia, meantime, one of their countrymen, who 
was a member of the Legislature — the late Hon. Michael 
O'Grady — had formed a relief committee, and offered to 
assist them to homes in a better and freer land than their 
own. The late Mr. A. M. Sullivan — from whose book I have 
quoted the details of the story — actively interested himself in 
their welfare. ' The poor people,' he writes, ' were sought out 
and collected. Some by this time had sunk under their 
sufferings. One man, named Bradley, had lost his reason 
under the shock ; other cases were nearly as heartrending. 
There were old men who would keep wandering over the hills 
in view of their ruined homes, full of the idea that some day 
Mr. Adair might let them return, but who at last had to be 
borne to the distant workhouse hospital to die.' 

' With a strange mixture of joy and sadness,' continues 
Mr. Sullivan, ' the survivors heard that their friends in Aus- 
tralia had paid their passage-money. On the day they were 
to set out for the railway station en route for Liverpool a 
strange scene was witnessed. The cavalcade was accom- 
panied by a concourse of neighbours and sympathisers. They 
had to pass within a short distance of the ancient burial- 
ground where the ' rude forefathers ' of the valley slept. They 
halted, turned aside, and proceeded to the grass-grown ceme- 
tery. Here in a body they knelt, flung themselves on the 
graves of their relatives, which they reverently kissed again 
and again, and raised for the last time the Irish caoine, or 
funeral wail. Then — some of them pulling tufts of the grass 
which they placed in their bosoms— they resumed their way 
on the road to exile.' 1 

It was not alone to the tenants themselves and the country 
population generally that these wholesale clearances were 
disastrous. Agriculture is practically the one industry of 
Ireland, and with the disappearance of the farmers around, 
disappeared the customers and the trade of the towns. Nor 
was this the only way in which the towns suffered from the 

1 New Ireland, pp. 229, 230. 



i8z THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

general exodus. The evicted farmers, in many cases, had 
not sufficient capital to pay their passage to America, and 
drifted into the towns. There but a comparatively small 
number of them could obtain employment, and they were 
transformed by due gradation into the vast army of beggars 
that infest the Irish towns, or into the paupers that rot in idle- 
ness within the workhouses. The towns thus suffered doubly 
in the decrease of the customers and the increase in the 
pauper population ; and hence it is that to-day there is in 
the villages and the smaller towns of Ireland ■ poverty more 
hopeless, chronic, and appalling than we can find even in the 
country. The agricultural labourers, the misery of whose 
condition has passed into a by-word even among Irish Chief 
Secretaries, and into the facts sadly acknowledged by even 
the most hostile and opposite sections of Irish opinion, are 
for the most part farmers whom eviction divorced from the 
soil. 

On the decadence which the clearances brought to the 
Irish in towns, the evidence is overwhelming ; indeed, any 
Irishman that has revisited after some years of absence his 
native place can give testimony on this point by recounting 
the painful impressions the terrible change he everywhere 
sees has left upon his mind. He finds a painfully large pro- 
portion of the people he has known gone in despair from 
the place — to America, or Australia, or England. Of those 
who remain behind, the majority are in the unrelaxing grip of 
unconquerable poverty. Take, out of numberless instances, 
the case of two towns. Mr. John Hynes tells l how on Mr. 
Lahiff 's estate, close to the town of Gort, there used in his 
young days to be two hundred families and a mile in tillage. 
Now — he was speaking of 1880 — all was grazing land and 
the town of Gort had been changed for a lane, and prosperous 
town to a struggling village. Francis Nicholls tells 2 the effect 
oi the clearances by Mr. Nicholson on the neighbouring 
town of Kells ; the pauper population had been largely in- 
creased, and it was impossible to tell how many of them 
lived through the winter months. These people were in 
almost every case evicted families. 

1 Evidence for Queen v. Parnell. 2 lb. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 183 

Ireland to-day bears the still fresh scars of the terrible 
sufferings of the years I am describing and the years which 
immediately preceded them. The most prominent, the most 
frequent, the ever-recurring feature of the Irish landscape is 
the unroofed cottage. There are many parts of the country 
where these skeleton walls stare at one with a persistency and 
a ghastly iteration that convey the idea of passing through a 
land which had been swept by rapidly successive and frequent 
waves of foreign invasion — by war, and slaughter, and the 
universal break-up of national life. Or shall I rather say that 
Ireland conveys the idea, not of a nation still young in hope 
and daily increasing in wealth and in possibilities, but rather 
the image of one of those oriental nations whose history and 
empire, wealth and hopes, belong to the irrevocable past. 
There are several counties where one can pass for miles with- 
out ever catching sight of a house or of any human face but 
that of the shepherd, almost as isolated as his hapless brother 
in the stretching plains of California. 

Meantime, while throughout Ireland this ghastly destruc- 
tion of a nation* was going on, the season was the most plea- 
sant and profitable that the political adventurer has ever 
known in Ireland. The country had fallen from rage to 
despair, and from despair to cynicism. The electoral con- 
tests of the time were conducted on a principle well under- 
stood though not publicly avowed. The political aspirant 
w r as to make profession of strong patriotic purpose, which the 
elector professed on his side to believe, and as the candidate 
used Parliament solely for the purpose of personal advance- 
ment, the elector pocketed the bribe while professing to be- 
lieve the candidate. A good deal of this corruption was the 
result of two other causes beside the daily increasing poverty 
of the country. First, there was no great or commanding 
personality ; secondly, there was nothing like the unity of a 
national purpose. This latter fact is a most important factor 
in this as in several other periods of Irish history. Election 
contests turned on purely personal or local issues. This man 
was preferred in one place because he was a better speaker or 
a more genial fellow ; and one constituency wanted a harbour 
and another a bridge. Thus, for instance, in Galway the chief 



1 84 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

desire of the people was that there should be some means of 
utilising the splendid bay of the town and its geographical 
destiny as the entrepot between the old and the new world. 
This aspiration of Galway was so notorious that it was utilised 
by all kinds of people. One of my boyish recollections is of 
a travelling show which added to the attractions of the then 
newly discovered ghost of Professor Pepper an American 
panorama — a country which at that time, in spite of the vast 
number of Irish emigrants, was a terra incognita. The lecturer 
who accompanied the show had taken the precaution to con- 
sult some of the knowing men of the town as to the local 
weaknesses, and turned the information thus received to ex- 
cellent account. He was describing one night some bay in 
America, and after a eulogy of its beauties in language of 
Transatlantic fervour, he wound up with the statement that 
it was the most beautiful bay in the world with two exceptions 
— the bay of Naples and the bay of Galway. The election 
in Galway was fought throughout these years on the question 
of the bay and a Transatlantic mail service ; and an English 
gentleman was returned more than once because he had 
succeeded in getting a subsidy from Lord Derby for a mail 
service between Galway and New York. 

A third reason of the political corruption of the constitu- 
encies was that the people had a distrust so profound in the 
men who sought their representation. One and all, they re- 
garded them as adventurers who, assuming different names — 
Tory, Whig, Peelite, Patriot — had all the same common end 
— personal aggrandisement. When men in Athlone, for in- 
stance, were reproached for taking bribes, the retort was that 
whether it was one self-seeker or another got in made no 
difference, and that a poor man might then be well excused 
if he made one or other of the rogues pay for his promo- 
tion. 

The candidates of these days belonged, as a rule, to eithcr 
of three classes. First, there were a certain number of English- 
men or of Irishmen settled in England who were anxious for 
seats in Parliament, because of the advantage it gave them in 
floating companies and other financial operations in the city 
of London. Then there were the children of the bourgeoisie. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 185 

who desired to gild the wealth gained by their parents 
in the sale of tea or of whisky. These men had become, 
as a rule, landed proprietors. The establishment of the 
Incumbered Estates Court, had enabled a large number 
of the bankrupt gentry of Ireland to dispose of their estates, 
and a new generation of landlords grew up in the shape of 
successful tradesmen who had the Celtic passion for the ac- 
quisition of land and the general desire to enter the county 
families which belongs to the successful men of trade in all 
parts of the three kingdoms. To make the transformation 
in such a case complete, a title was necessary ; and many of 
the children of the bourgeoisie spent tens of thousands of 
pounds, and followed the Ministerial whip with the abject 
devotion of ten years, in the hope of receiving a baronetcy at 
the end of it all ! 

But the most common type of Irish politician in these 
days was the man who entered Parliamentary life solely for 
the purpose of selling himself for place and salary. This was 
the golden season when every Irishman who could scrape as 
much money together as would pay his election expenses 
was able, after a while, to obtain a governorship or some 
other of the many substantial rewards which English party 
leaders were able to give to their followers. The chief per- 
sons to benefit by this time of universal corruption were the 
Irish barristers. They had advantages over every other com- 
petitors. They were accustomed to speaking, their names 
were familiar to the public ; in short, they were marked out 
for political life above all other classes in Ireland, as in every 
other country where there are Parliamentary institutions and 
a legal profession. Parliament was made during this whole 
period the sole avenue through which professional promotion 
could be obtained. It was one of the many things which 
helped to embitter Irish opinion against English rule, in those 
robust natures where national feeling still lived, that English 
Ministers at this period seemed to delight in increasing the 
chances of political adventurers, and sought to maintain the 
hated. Act of Union by means as shameless as those by which 
it had been passed. For nearly a quarter of a century there 
were only two cases in which men were raised to the Bench 



1 86 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

who had not in the first instance been members of Parliament. 
These two cases were, I may add, those of two Conservatives — 
Mr. Christian and Mr. Fitzgerald, who, according to universal 
acknowledgment, were two of the greatest Judges that ever 
sat upon the Irish bench. In every other instance the 
Judge passed first through a Parliamentary career. The man 
who was sure of a constituency was certain of a Judgeship, 
even though he w r as ignorant of the very elements of law, 
and had rarely even received a brief. 

The career of most of these politicians had a certain re- 
semblance to that of Judge Keogh, though, of course, there 
were wanting the circumstances that gave such fatal results 
to his treachery, and were conceived in a minor key of lies 
and pledges. The barrister started as a patriot of rather 
a pronounced type, lamented the emigration, called for a 
Land Bill, and spoke disrespectfully of the Government. 
A typical case was that of the gentleman who is now 
known as Lord Fitzgerald. He was present, when a young 
barrister, at a banquet in Cork to the Lord-Lieutenant, 
and being called upon to make a speech, he astounded 
everybody and shocked the greater part of a servile audience 
by bursting into a violently national speech, and uttering 
things about the miseries and wrongs of Ireland which, 
though true, were not deemed such as Viceregal ears 
should hear or a rising and ambitious barrister should utter. 
But, in the midst of the interruptions of the loyal, Mr. 
Fitzgerald went on his way, and in the end became, or 
affected to become, so frenzied by the grief at his country's 
wrongs that he jumped on the table, and there continued 
his harangue. A young reporter who was present at this 
strange scene remarked to Serjeant Murphy — a cynical 
Irishman who had been a member of Parliament for many 
years, and had nothing in the shape of political corruption to 
learn — what a pity it was that a promising young barrister 
like Fitzgerald had ruined himself. ' Ruined,' said Murphy 
with a laugh ; ' why he has made himself ! ' And the pro- 
phecy was correct, for shortly afterwards Mr. Fitzgerald was 
a law officer of the Crown, then in due time was created 
a Judge, and atoned for any patriotic passion, real or simu- 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 187 

lated, of his electioneering days by the fervour with which he 
has persecuted all national movements ever since. The 
reporter who had the conversation with Murphy just recorded 
reappears in these pages ; it was Justin M'Carthy. 

The struggle for national principles was not, however, 
entirely abandoned. The old principle of the Tenant League, 
that the candidate should remain independent of both parties 
and fight for the cause of Ireland alone, was still preached. This 
principle was known as the policy of Independent Opposition. 
At every election, Independent Opposition candidates were 
started, and occasionally they managed to get returned. But 
they were always few in number, and the number became 
smaller as the time went on. As every army contains within 
its ranks a certain number who, being miserably base, become 
deserters, every Irish party has its quota of corrupt or mean 
natures, that are in time transformed from Irish patriots into 
Liberal or Tory camp-followers. In this way many candi- 
dates, elected as members of an Independent Irish Opposition, 
became place-holders, under some English administration. 
The times were out of joint, and Independent Opposition 
never realised the proportions of a large or effective party. 

There was one other influence which deserves to be 
mentioned. Throughout all these years of apparently hope- 
less struggle the ' Nation ' newspaper remained true to the 
principles of its founders. It preached in season and out of 
season the right of Ireland to national existence, of the tenant 
to protection, and Independent Opposition as the only 
means by which these great ends could be attained. In face 
of the British Government, unchecked by perfidious Parlia- 
mentarians, by omnipotent landlordism, by the narrow elec- 
torate sunk in open corruption, and of the masses buried in 
despair, A. M. Sullivan and his brother, T. D. Sullivan, 
worked on, hoped on. To these two brothers Ireland owes 
it that the lamp of national faith and hope was held aloft 
through this long and apparently endless night of eviction, 
hunger, emigration, triumphant tyranny, and political perfidy. 

Meantime the moment has come again for surveying the 
position of Ireland from the standpoint of the Unionist and 
of the English Liberal. Ireland was now in the position 



1 88 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

which ought to appear the very ideal position to the Unionist 
and the Liberal. As after the overthrow of O'Connell, so 
after the treason of Keogh, there was no party either of open 
violence or of a constitutional character seeking any change 
in the legislative relations between England and Ireland. 
On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of the repre- 
sentatives from Ireland were pledged and firm upholders of 
the Act of Union. Liberalism was in a position in Ireland 
equally ideal and equally prosperous. The Liberals had 
during all these years an almost undisputed monopoly of 
power. Lord Palmerston, in the period between 1855 an d 
1865, occupied a position of something like dictatorship in 
English politics ; and Ireland supplied to his ranks a large 
majority of representatives whom no neglect of their country 
could madden into a patriotic outburst and no insult could 
rouse to a moment of stalwart manhood. The National 
Party was extinct — murdered by Irish treason and Liberal 
corruption : in its stead reigned the Liberal party, and to the 
Imperial Parliament the Irish people could alone look. It 
ought to follow, according to the conclusions which Liberal 
reasoning regards as inevitable, that this would be a period 
of halcyon and dazzling prosperity for the country. Proof 
has been given of how much prosperity there was, and now 
it is well to turn from the country advancing daily more 
rapidly to depopulation, with tyranny more and more 
aggressive, and see what the Imperial Assembly with its 
Liberal majority was doing for the Irish people. 

The tale of the Imperial Parliament may be summed up 
in a sentence. Every proposal for the reform of the land 
tenure or of any other Irish abuse met with steady and 
usually with contemptuous rejection. 

In 1852 Mr. Sharman Crawford brought in a Tenant 
Right Bill once again ; it 'was defeated on the second reading 
by 167 votes to 57. In November of the same year the 
Conservative Government were in power, and the first gleam 
of light broke the long eclipse of the question. It was an Irish 
Conservative that deserves the credit of making the attempt 
to settle the question. Mr. (afterwards Sir) Joseph Napier 
brought in a series of Bills ; three were in the interests of the 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 189 

landlords, one — the Tenant Compensation Bill — was in 
favour of the tenants. These Bills and a Bill of Mr. Sharman 
Crawford were referred to a committee. In February 1853 
the Committee met, and, principally through the influence of 
Lord Palmerston, Sharman Crawford's Bill was rejected, and 
the Tenant Compensation Bill of the Conservative law officer 
was amended for the worse. This Bill passed the three 
stages in the House of Commons ; it was sent up to the 
House of Lords in August ; there was an immediate concourse 
of their lordships, and the Bill was hung up. In the following 
year (1854) their lordships resumed the consideration of the 
Bills. The three favourably changing the law for the land- 
lords were accepted, the Tenants' Compensation Bill was 
rejected, and thus came to a final end the well-meant and 
bold effort of a Conservative statesman to give the tenant 
some compensation for the expenditure of his capital. 

The Irish Tenant Righters still hoped on, and in 1855 
the work of introducing Bills was again renewed, and again 
Irish demands met in each succeeding session the same re- 
ception. Serjeant Shee, who brought in a Bill, proposed that 
compensation should be given for improvements both retro- 
spective and future. Lord Palmerston could not tolerate 
such an interference with the rights of property, and carried 
an amendment limiting the period to which compensation for 
improvement should be confined to twenty years. This 
destroyed the good that was in the Bill, and it was dropped. 
In 1856 again, Mr. George Henry Moore brought in a Bill ; 
its object was to extend the Ulster custom to all Ireland. 
It was read a second time on June 8. The next day Mr. 
Horsman, the Liberal Chief Secretary, announced that the 
Government intended to oppose it, and it was dropped. In 

1857 Mr. Moore again brought forward a Bill, but he could 
not secure a day for its discussion, and it was dropped. In 

1858 Mr. John Francis Maguire brought in a Bill; it was 
defeated on the second reading, mainly through the influence 
of Lord Palmerston. 

In i860 the question was taken up by the Ministry, and 
they passed two Acts ; both were completely inoperative, 
one most fortunately so. Mr. Cardwell passed an Act giving 



190 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

limited owners a right to grant leases, but the terms were so 
severe and so unsuitable that nobody took advantage of it, 
and year after year returns showed the same result — in 
no single instance had anybody taken any advantage of 
the Act. 1 

The other Act passed in the same year, and known as 
Deasy's Act, was intended to make tenancies in Ireland 
entirely a matter of contract and to deprive the tenants of all 
those rights which they had claimed from time immemorial, 
and which, though robbed of them by the landlord, they 
really were entitled to by the common law of England. It 
was doubtful whether, under that common law, the tenant was 
not entitled to compensation for his improvements. 2 Deasy's 
Act set all this at rest, for it declared that the tenant could 
lay no claim to any improvements, save such as had been 
made by express contract with the landlord. The meaning 
of this Act, if it had been carried out, would be that practically 
all the improvements made by the tenants throughout Ireland 
were by a stroke of the pen confiscated to the landlord. In 
successive sessions after this till 1868 the land question met 
with the same fortunes. All reform was steadily refused. 

One thing more added bitterness to this steady failure to 
obtain justice from the Imperial Parliament. This was the 
bitter insolence with which the rejection of all claims was 
accompanied. Let me quote a description of this side of the 
Irish question from a writer of impartiality in the contest 
between English Liberals and Irish Nationalists. 

The conduct of the Liberal party (writes Mr. Cashel Hoey 3 ) for 
the last twenty-five years must also be considered. Nothing has 
transpired concerning the case of the Established Church that was 
not known when the Appropriation Clause was debated — nothing 
regarding the condition of the Irish tenant that was not known when 
the Devon Commission reported. But that great party which had 
received the unbroken support of the Irish Catholics at every general 

1 Is Ireland Irreconcilable ? By J. Cashel Hoey. P. io, 

2 See Barry O'Brien, The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, 

P- "3- 

3 Is Ireland Irreconcilable ? Reprinted from the Dublin Review. By John 
Cashel Hoey. Pp. 8- 13. This article appeared during the first Gladstone 
Administration. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 191 

election since their emancipation was gradually passing, so lately as 
five years ago, from a state of ignoble apathy to a state of pronounced 
hostility to their claims. . . . 

It is indeed almost impossible to realise now the depth of im- 
becility and insolence which characterised the language of the 
Liberal statesmen of this period whenever they spoke of the affairs 
of Ireland. Lord Palmerston reigned and governed. He said of 
the Ulster tenant-right : 'Tenant-right is landlord wrong.' He said 
of the principle of retrospective compensation : 'A retrospective 
enactment, which transfers from the landlord to the tenant that which 
by law has hitherto been the property of the former, which both 
parties know and have always known to be his property, an Act 
which does this is, I conceive, most unjust, and ought not to be 
allowed.' When a much more moderate Bill than the Bill of the 
present Government was introduced in 1858, he said : 'The main 
and fundamental principle of this Bill appears to me to be at variance 
with justice. ... It would be trifling with the House, and an abuse 
of its forms, to read it a second time.' The Irish Secretaries of this 
period were Mr. Horsman, Mr. Cardwell, and Sir Robert Peel. . . . 
When he was at the Castle, a mot was made by, or more probably 
invented for him, to express his sense of his duties : ' Carlisle does 
the State. Larcom does the work. I hunt.' His first parliamentary 
appearance in the capacity of Irish Secretary was when he divided 
the House of Commons successfully against Serjeant Shee on the 
question of Retrospective Compensation. The only other sign of 
public vigour that he exhibited while he was in Ireland was a rather 
scurrilous attack upon the Council of the Tenant League. Not 
without regret we cite Mr. Cardwell in the same category. . . . On 
the question of the Protestant Establishment, in reply to Mr. Bernal 
Osborne, Mr. Cardwell said so lately as 1863 : 'What the honourable 
gentleman really means is an abstract resolution of this House con- 
demning the Irish Church. ... I believe this House will not 
surrender the principle of an Established Church. I believe it will 
not alienate the property of the Church from the ecclesiastical uses 
to which it has been devoted.' But, on the Land Question, Mr. 
Cardwell legislated with an ostentatious profession that he was finally 
closing the subject, so far as law could close anything. His Land- 
lord and Tenant Act was the only measure regarding the social 
condition of the Irish people, as the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was the 
only one regarding their religious liberties, that had been passed 
through Parliament by Liberal Governments since the death of 
O'Connell ; and the two Acts, however different in their intent, were 



192 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT. 

alike in this, that each was a dead letter from the moment it received 
the Queen's signature. . . . 

Mr. Maguire, in 1865, obtained a Select Committee to inquire 
into the operation of the Cardwell Act. Touching its nomination, 
there was a scene in Parliament which no Irishman who witnessed it 
will . easily forget. Mr. Roebuck, evidently speaking the sense of 
both sides of the House, for he was cheered all round, especially 
when he used the word 'eviscerating,' appealed to Lord Palmerston 
in these terms : 

' I would ask the noble lord, if he should consent to any Com- 
mittee on this subject, to appoint a Committee composed of men of 
cross-examining powers, or, as I once heard a learned friend of mine 
call it, eviscerating powers, because, with such a Committee, a man 
with notions about tenant-right and belief that he possesses some 
talismanic means of settling all these questions, no sooner appears 
before it than his courage begins to ooze out of him, and you have 
him not only telling the whole truth, but utterly confounding himself 
when he is in error.' 

Lord Palmerston, in his reply, also caught the cheers of both 
sides of the House by the cheap truism, that he, for his part, could 
not see ' the justice or advantage of giving to one man the right of 
determining what should be done with another man's property ' ; and 
then, nodding to Mr. Roebuck, he said that ' if the Committee con- 
tained good cross-examiners, so much the better.' Anyone who may 
read the evidence of that important Committee, whose proceedings 
are one of the most curious landmarks in recent Parliamentary 
history, will discover at least "these three things : — First, that if the 
disgusting epithet employed by Mr. Roebuck, and apparently adopted 
by the House, can be said to characterise the conduct of any of the 
members of that Committee, they are Mr. Cardwell, Mr. Lowe, and 
the Chief Secretary, Sir Robert Peel ; secondly, that the Conservative 
members of the Committee showed much more consideration for the 
case of the tenantry than did the Liberals, who were identified with 
the Government ; and thirdly, that the Report was in direct con- 
tradiction of all the evidence received, the witnesses being, perhaps, 
the best qualified, in point of authority and experience, that could be 
found . in the country. The Committee very tersely reported that 
' the principle that compensation should only be secured upon im- 
provements made with the consent of the landlord should be main- 
tained.' And on June 23, 1865, Mr. Cardwell, in pompous and 
pitiless words, pronounced this final judgment on the Tenant Right 
cause to the House of Commons and the Irish people : — 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 193 

' I am exceedingly glad that we are not about to separate under 
the imputation of having given an uncertain sound upon this subject. 
Whatever may have been the reasons for this discussion, I think that 
at any rate we should be open to grave reprehension if we permitted 
the impression to go forth in Ireland that we are at all uncertain 
about the rights of property in that country. I wish to express my 
individual opinion that, by whatever name it may be called, com- 
pulsory compensation for improvements effected against the will of 
the landlord is not a principle which is consistent with the rights of 
property. ... I am glad that the Committee has not separated 
without giving its opinions distinctly on the questions which have 
been raised, and I do hope that every effort will be made in all 
future time, when measures for encouraging* the improvement of land 
in Ireland are brought forward, to give every legitimate facility for 
such improvements. I wish it may be distinctly understood that 
only such facilities as are legitimate, and do not interfere with the 
rights of property, will be sanctioned by Parliament. I am convinced 
that it is more in accordance with the feeling of a high-spirited 
people that they should be spoken to in plain terms ; and I have 
that opinion of the Irish people that I do not think they would 
approve an insincere and uncertain course on an important subject 
like this, or that they would at all thank the Committee for giving an 
ambiguous opinion upon it.' 

The language of the Ministers charged with the administration 
of Ireland at that time, in regard to the grievances which Mr. Glad- 
stone has made Cabinet questions, appeared to be in some degree 
demented. The transition from the administration of Mr. Cardwell 
to that of Sir Robert Peel was not inaptly described as the reign of 
Hugger-Mugger followed by the reign of Harum-Scarum. But the 
difference was only one of manner, not of method. When Sir 
Robert Peel was asked by Mr. Maguire, early in 1864, whether the 
Government intended to introduce any measure affecting the relation 
of landlord and tenant, he replied, in his most supercilious style, that 
' it was not the intention of Government to introduce any measure of 
the nature alluded to.' Using Lord Palmerston's name in sanction of 
his statement — and the noble lord never protested — he had declared 
a year before that the Government was determined to maintain the 
Protestant Church Establishment in Ireland at all hazards : 

' If,' he said, ' this question is to be agitated again, either in the 
present session or in the next, it is time for us, no matter on what 
side we sit, frankly to declare our opinion, and to choose our party 
for the struggle. I, for one, unhesitatingly affirm, that if that moment 



194 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

has come, I shall be found — ay, and acting under the advice and 
guidance of the noble lord at the head of the Government — I shall 
be found contending on behalf of those principles which for two 
centuries have ever been, and God grant they may long continue to 
be— the centre of loyalty to the throne and the bulwark of civil and 
religious liberty.' 

It may be not unfairly said that such an administration as that of 
Sir Robert Peel was never imposed upon any country by England 
before — on Bengalees, or Maoris, or Black men, or Red men, or even 
on Ireland. If Lord Palmerston had designed it, he could not have 
contrived a counter-irritant more calculated to stimulate to a dan- 
gerous heat the stagnant blood of the country. There was not a 
considerable class of persons in Ireland, from the Catholic bishops 
to the tenant farmers, whom the Secretary did not outrage, or at 
least alienate, the Orangemen of Ulster excepted. 

To the list of outbursts of insolent ignorance which Mr. 
Cashel Hoey has thus arrayed many others could be added — 
some by the gentlemen whom he has quoted. Mr. Lowe, 
speaking in the debate on a small Tenant-Right Bill in 
1865, denounced any attempt to interfere between landlord 
and tenant in unmeasured terms. 

If the tenant (he said) chooses to improve the land, unless he takes 
the precaution to obtain the consent of the landlord — whether he in- 
creases the value of the property or not — he has no business to meddle 
with it. It is in the nature of a deposit on his hands, and he ought 
to return it as he received it. He receives it for a particular purpose, 
and for that purpose only ought he to use it. If he uses it for 
another purpose — to build a house on it for instance — it may be a 
great improvement, but he has no right to do it ; it is beyond the 
contract he entered into. 1 

No attempt (he again said) has been made to show that there is 
any case of practical grievance. ... I do not believe that there is 
any really serious demand on the part of the tenantry of Ireland 
for this measure. (Oh ! oh !) I do not pretend to have any exten- 
sive knowledge of Ireland or its people. ... I did not find, after 
hearing the evidence of a great number of gentlemen, that there was 
any such demand. . . . The landlords, I humbly submit, are better 
judges in the matter of granting leases than the House can pos- 
sibly be. 2 

1 Hansard, vol. clxxxiii. p. 1079. 2 lb, pp. 1082-1084. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 195 

But it was in Ireland itself that the Irish people were 
preached at in the most maddening form. While all around 
their country was being reduced to a desert and the people 
were flying with curses from their shores, the English autho- 
rities kept proving that the country was never in a more pros- 
perous position. Of this gospel there were three preachers 
prominent above all others. Archbishop Whately and Mr. 
Nassau Senior professed the narrowest and, as all men now 
think, the most reactionary creed of the laissez-faire school 
of Political Economy ; and, both endowed with more than an 
ordinary amount of personal and professional self-conceit, they 
taught their ignorant and destructive gospel with calm and 
arrogant assumption. Both Englishmen, they give one the 
impression in all their utterances that, in dealing with Irish 
affairs, they were addressing a nation half of children, half 
of barbarians, to be pitied, scorned, and, when troublesome, 
to be hanged or shot down. 

Let us take one or two specimens of their doctrines, 
always remembering that they were intended for application 
to Ireland. 

' If a piece of land is your property/ writes Archbishop 
Whately, ' you ought to be at liberty to dispose of it like any 
other property ; either to sell it, or to cultivate it yourself, or 
to employ a bailiff and labourers to cultivate it for you, or to 
let it to a farmer.' 

There the absolute claim of the landlord at this period to 
do what he liked with his own — to starve through rack-rent, 
to impoverish or even kill through eviction — was represented 
not as the greedy and heartless gospel of a dominant class, 
but as a great scientific truth. 

' If you were to make a law for lowering rents,' writes Arch- 
bishop Whately, ' so that the land should still remain the 
property of those to whom it now belongs, but that they 
should not be allowed to receive more than so much an acre 
for it, the only effect would be that the landlord would no 
longer let his land to a farmer, but would take it into his own 
hands and employ a bailiff to look after it for him.' 

These words were written at a time when the Irish 
farmers were engaged in an effort to bring about the passing 



196 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of a law that would lead to the ' lowering of rents,' and under 
which the landlords ( should not be allowed to receive more 
han so much an acre for it ' ; in other words, for the fair 
rent fixed by a Law Court which has been conferred by the 
Land Act of 1881. The children of these farmers were taught 
— and in the name of the Science of Political Economy — that 
the only effect of getting what they were demanding would 
be the utter ruin of their class. For it is a significant fact 
that the extracts I have quoted appear in one of the reading- 
books supplied by the Commissioners of National Education 
in the so-called National Schools of Ireland. 1 

The opinions of Mr. Senior are scattered over several 
volumes. His 'Journals, Conversations, and Essays relating 
to Ireland ' 2 give the best insight into his own ideas and the 
ideas then dominant among English thinkers and statesmen. 
Mr. Senior spent the greater part of his time in Ireland among 
those landlords and agents, who were remarkable above others 
for their ruthless persecution of the tenantry, and he quotes 
with much approval their nostrums for the cure of the Irish 
malady. 

' Mr. Trench spoke highly of his cousin, Mr. Francis Trench,' 
writes Mr. Senior. ' His intelligence,' he said, ■ may be estimated 
by what he has done. Soon after the famine, the Duke of 
Leinster's tenants in Kildare threw up their holdings (amount- 
ing to about 2,000 acres in all), frightened by the potato 
failure arid the poor-rates. Francis Trench had undertaken 
the agency a few years before. He cleared the land by an ex- 
tensive emigration, and advertised widely in the Scotch papers 
for tenants. In time, the estate was relet. The rental, which 
had been 35,000/. a year, was by improved management, and by 
the falling in of very old leases, raised to 45,000/./ and the 
tenants {especially the Scotch) are doing well! 3 

1 Fifth Reading Book, pp 257, 262, Sixth Edition. These extracts were 
also, I believe, in the earlier editions. 

• Journals, vol. ii. pp. 85, 86. 

3 The italics are mine. This Mr. Trench, who found the conduct of his 
cousin so admirable, had acted on the same principle on more than one estate 
himself. This was the district of Farney, in County Monaghan. This area, 70,000 
acres in extent, was seized from the M'Mahon and given to the Earl of Essex. 
He relet it to Evor M'Mahon for 250/. a year. The land became more valuable 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 197 

Again, Mr. Senior records a conversation with a gentle- 
man disguised as ' Dr. G.' They are talking about the land 
question. 

' Well/ said Dr. G., ' we have got our Poor Law, and it is 
a great instrument for giving the victory to the landlords. 
Another and a still more powerful instrument is emigration, 
and it is one never used on such a scale before. No friend 
of Ireland can wish the war to be prolonged — still less, that it 
should end by the victory of the tenants ; for that would plunge 
Ireland into barbarism worse than that of the last century. 
The sooner Ireland becomes a grazing country, with the com- 
paratively thin population which a grazing country requires, the 
better for all classes' 

as time went on: in 1729 the estimated value was 2,000/. a year : in 1769, the 
barony having been divided between two sisters, co-heiresses, the two estates 
were valued at 8,000 a year ; and ' in the year 1843, and seventy-four years after 
the estimated value of the year 1769, I found, on my arrival at Carrickmacross, that 
the rent-roll of the two estates together amounted to upwards of 40,000/. per 
annum, whilst the inhabitants had increased in such an extraordinary manner that 
by the census of 1841 the population amounted to something upwards of 44,107 
souls. ' (' Realities of Irish Life,' quoted in Sir John Gray's speech at Manchester, 
p. 25.) In 1867, the rent had increased still further to 54,833/. ' No doubt,' 
said Mr. Trench in a Committee of the House of Commons, 1867 (quoted by 
Gray, p. 26), ' the rise in the price of produce and the value of land has done 
much in causing this increase. But the main cause, beyond all question, is that 
the barony had increased enormously and rapidly in population, and as a consequent 
necessity in cultivation. In 1633 there were only 38 tenants acknowledged in 
the barony, and though I believe there were a considerable number of under- 
tenants, yet the population must have been very small. In 1841 there were up- 
wards of 8,000 tenants, and the population amounted to 44,000 persons ; in fact, 
a human being for every Irish acre of land. This vast population, driven to ex- 
tremities to support themselves, gradually converted, by their o%vn labour, the lands 
of the barony from being a waste unenclosed alder plain, into one of the most 
cultivated districts in Ireland, well enclosed arable land, whilst scarcely an acre 
of reclaimalle 1 nd now lies unreclaimed.' 'Mr. Trench,' comments Sir John 
Gray (pp. 26, 27), admitted that ' the main cause, beyond all question,' of the 
conversion of the wild and waste alder plain into a tract of the richest- and best 
cultivated land in Ireland, and the consequent increase of its value, was due to 
the energetic and unrelaxing toil of the tenant farmers who lived upon it, but who, 
when they ha.d made the barren plain fruitful, and when there remained no more 
Ian ( to be reclaimed for' the landlord's benefit, were felt to be an intolerable 
burden upon the landlord's hands, with whom they ' had to deal ' (hear, hear, 
and cheers). How these toiling industrious people were ' dealt with,' what be- 
came of these Celts who were permitted — 'allowed' was, he believed, the phrase 
— to increase and multiply in Farney, who by their labour had changed the value 



198 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Mr. Senior is naturally delighted with such sound opinions. 
' Earnestly wishing, as you do,' he says to Dr. G., ' to see 
Ireland a grazing country, and therefore thinly populated 
as respects its agricultural population,' etc. ' 

Archbishop Whately and Mr. Nassau Senior were the 
philosophers of the gospel that emigration was the real cure 
for Ireland, but this cause had a more potent advocate in the 
Lord-Lieutenant of the period. From 1855 to 1858 Lord 
Carlisle was Viceroy, and again from 1859 till 1864. The 
character of Lord Carlisle is well known. He was an unctuous, 
smooth-spoken man, and while Ireland was bleeding in every 
pcre, softly, poetically murmured that the country was every 
day advancing more rapidly in prosperity. Each of his 
speeches was a paean over the progress of the country, pro- 
gress consisting in the increase of cattle and the disappear- 
ance of men and women. Two extracts will suffice to show 
the crass gospel of this enlightened ruler. 

' Nor can I be debarred,' said Lord Carlisle, speaking at 
the Annual Cattle Show of the Royal Agricultural Society in 
Athlone, on August 7, 1855, ' even by the golden promise of 
those harvests which now gladden our eyes, from urging you 
to bear in mind, what Nature in her wise economy seems 
specially to have fitted this island for is to be the mother of 

of the estate from 250/. a year to 40,000/., increased, according to Mr. Trench's 
sworn evidence, to 54,833/. in 1867, he (Sir John Gray) could not tell, nor did he 
think it would be of much use now to inquire (hear, hear) ; but this he could tell, 
that the population of Farney, which was 44,107 in 1841, and Mr. Trench says 
it was ' something upwards ' in 1843, when he came to rule over it, has in eight 
years of his rule been reduced to 31,519, and that in the same period 2,009 houses 
were levelled (cheers). More than 12,588 of the 'surplus population' of that 
barony were moved out of it in eight years — some to America — some to Australia 
— some to the pauper's grave (hear. hear). All were yone. As the sheep who 
had eaten down all the rape and trampled the refuse into the land could fertilise 
it no more and were sent to the shambles, so the Celts, at one time ' allowed to 
multiply' in Farney, could reclaim no more, and they, too, were sent off as useless 
incumberers of the ground (cheers). 

1 Journal, vol. ii. pp. 282, 283. In justice to Mr. Senior, it should be said 
that he was perfectly impartial as to all nationalities in his doctrine, that the fewer 
people were on the land the better. In the same conversation he speaks of the 
' absorption of the surplus population of the Highlands of Scotland, when black 
cattle and sheep took the place of men,' as ' one of the largest and most bene- 
ficent clearings on record ' (ib. p. 282). 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 199 

flocks and herds ; to be, if I may say so, the larder and dairy 
of the world ; to send rations of beef and bales of bacon to 
our armies wherever they are ; and to send firkins of butter 
to every sea and harbour of the habitable globe.' l 

In a speech at the annual cattle show at Cork (July 5, 
i860), and indeed in nearly every one of his speeches, the 
same gospel was laid down, that the more people left Ireland 
the more prosperous the country was, and that the great 
ideal of legislation was to change as much of the land as 
possible into pasture. 

' Cattle,' he said, ' above all things, seem to be rendered, 
by the conditions of soil and climate, the most appropriate 

stock for Ireland Hence, the great hives of industry in 

England and Scotland across the Channel can draw their 
frequent shiploads of corn from more southern and drier 
climates, but they must have a constant dependence in 
Ireland for a supply of meat. . . . With reference to the 
general concerns of Ireland, I feel I am justified in speaking 
to you, upon the whole, in the terms of congratulation and 
hopefulness. . . . Then .... the mud-cabins of Ireland 
amounted in 1 841, not twenty years ago, to 491,000; they 
have now diminished to i2 5,ooo. 2 The number of emigrants, 
which had been gradually decreasing for some years, has 
somewhat increased in the last and present years. . . . They 
now comprise many young people of both sexes who have been 
comparatively well educated, and who hope to find in a less 
crowded community a better market for their industry and 
a more adequate demand for their natural and acquired 
intelligence ; but I conceive this is not a symptom, with what- 
ever immediate and local inconvenience it may no doubt be 
attended, at zvhich, viewed at large, we ought to repine! 3 

A few statistics will bring clearly before the mind of the 
reader how the policy of expatriation was working : — 

Emigration from Ireland. 
1849-1860 . ; . 1,551,000 

1861-1870 . , . 867,000* 

1 The Speeches, Lectures, and Poems, &c. of the Earl of Carlisle, pp. 158, 159 
By J. J. Gaskin. 

2 He does not say what had become of the occupants. 

3 The Speeches, Lectures, and Poems, &=c. of the Earl of Carlisle, pp. 1 78- 18 1 » 

4 Mulhall's Dictv nary of Statistics, p. 16S. 



2oo THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

And another table will be still more instructive : it is the 
ratio of the ages of the emigrants ' : — 

Under 15 years . . . . 15 per cent. 

15 to 35 „ . . . 75 

Over 35 „ ... 10 

Thus it will be seen that only half the case is stated when 
it is said that emigration — with great assistance from hunger, 
plague and eviction — within the years 1845 and 1885 has 
reduced the population by nearly one-half : the half that emi- 
grated was the better, the half that remained was the worse, 
half of the population. Seventy-five per cent, of the emigrants 
were between fifteen and thirty-five — the best years in the life 
of men or women. ' During the seven months of the year ' 
(1863), wrote the 'Times,' 2 '80,000, chiefly young men and 
women, have left Ireland, most of them for ever. They have 
gone off with money in their pockets, and with strong limbs 
and stout hearts. They have left behind the ailing, the weak, 
and the aged! 

There is no passion like the suppressed passion of statis- 
tics ; and I leave these figures to tell their own moral. Mean- 
time, there was one force further which must be reckoned 
among the factors that produced the temper of Ireland at 
this epoch. 

The sight of a race rushing from its native land in 
millions might, it would be thought, have touched even 
enemies as marking the very height of tragic suffering. But 
such was not the effect upon the journalism of England, As 
the Irish peasants left their country in curses and tears, 
the English newspapers seized every opportunity of mock- 
ing at their sufferings and their demands for the reform of 
the laws by which their misery and their enforced exile were 
produced. Through the persistent raising of the rent, and 
the incessant eviction, chronic poverty periodically deepened 
into famine and appeals had to be made in these crises to the 
aid of the charitable. All such appeals the ' Times ' and other 
English journals denounced as obtaining money under false 
pretences. 

1 Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics, p. 168. 

2 Quoted in Nation, Oct. 24, 1863. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 201 

Should her people (wrote the 'Times' of Ireland in 1863), instead 
of complaining to Parliament that they have been ruined by a succes- 
sion of bad seasons, set themselves to develop the mines of the country; 
should the manufacturing industry, which has been destroyed by a 
succession of strikes, show symptoms of revival, well might the 
magnates of Ireland meet together to celebrate an event so auspicious. 1 
But all this is savoured too much zvith self-reliance and independence. 
It would be too Saxon, too little suited to the aspiring genius of a Celtic 
nationality, to do that themselves which it is possible to have done for 
them by others? 

And the same journal over, and over again pointed with 
exultation to the probability that the Irish race would be 
annihilated in Ireland, and that the country would then be 
entirely seized by the population of the stronger country. 

If this goes on long (it wrote of the emigration in i860), as it is 
continuing to go on, Ireland will become very English, and the United 
States very Irish. When an English agriculturist takes a farm in 
Galway or Kerry he will take English labourers with him. 3 

The Irish will go (it wrote in 1863). English and Scotch settlers 
must be speedily got in their places, for Great Britain will suffer, the 
British markets will go. 4 

The Celt (it wrote again in 1865) goes to yield to the Saxon. 
This island of 160 harbours, with its fertile soil, with noble rivers 
and beautiful lakes, with fertile mines and riches of every kind, is 
being cleared quietly for the interests and luxury of humanity. 5 

This extract, finally, from the leading English journal : — 

Curran used to say that his countrymen made very bad subjects, 
but much worse rebels. The mot was a good one in its own day, but 
it has not lost its point. . . . Comparative anatomists of political 
societies might, by a close study of it, perhaps make a complete 
sketch of the social monstrosity which such a phrase would fit— a 
discontented, hungry, empty-bellied community, begging for alms ; 
too idle to work, too shrewd to fight, too profoundly convinced of the 
dishonesty o£ its own members to do aught but shout and roar and 
threaten and beg. 6 

1 A meeting had been held to celebrate the grant of a small subsidy to Galway. 

2 Quoted in Nation, Nov. 14, 1863. 

3 Quoted in Irishman, May 12, i860. 
* Quoted in Nation, Nov. 14, 1863. 

s lb. Aug. 26, 1S65. 6 lb. Nov. 6, 1858. 



202 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Acts of signal folly (wrote the 'Manchester Review'), the Irish are 
not slow to commit ; words of eminent absurdity the Irish are not 
slow to utter. We must not marvel, then, that faithful to their characr 
teristic folly and absurdity they should mingle with other Irish howls 
that of Ireland for the Irish. Ireland owes to England the whole of 
its civilisation ; it has long adopted the language of its conquerors. 
Must that civilisation be thrown aside ? Must not that be renounced 
if Ireland is to be for the Irish ? and must Ireland forthwith proceed 
to invent a civilisation of its own, and to revive the speech which 
still lingers in the mouth of the ugliest, most barbarous, most ignorant 
and turbulent of its population ? x 

An Irish priest, lamenting the wrongs of Ireland, was de- 
scribed in the ' Daily Telegraph ' as ' a surpliced ruffian ' ; a 
Catholic archbishop, mourning over the emigration, was de- 
scribed by the ' Saturday Review ' as regretting the departure 
' of the demons of assassination and murder.' 

The Lion of St. Jarlath's (said the article of the 'Saturday Review,' 
November 28, 1863) has growled in grievous dudgeon that bucolic 
tastes are prevailing in Ireland. Archbishop John of Tuam surveys 
with an envious eye what, in a Churchman, it seems rather profane 
to style the Irish Exodus ; and in a letter addressed to Mr. Gladstone 
... he sighs over the departing demons of assassination and murder. 
Like his friend Mr. Smith O'Brien, he regrets the loss of the raw 
materials of treason and sedition. Ireland, he says, is relapsing into 
a desert, tenanted by lowing herds instead of howling assassins. So 
complete is the rush of departing marauders, whose lives were pro- 
fitably employed in shooting Protestants from behind a hedge, that 
silence reigns over the vast solitude of Ireland. . . . Ireland has long 
been seething in the flames of misrule and agitation and sedition. 
Ireland is boiling over, and the scum flows across the Atlantic ; and 
the more the Archbishop and the like of him blow at the fire, the 
more the scum will boil over. It can be spared, and the many ex- 
cellences of the Irish people will only become the more excellent by 
the present process of defecation. 

The people who were thus described were as like the 
pictures drawn of them as real human beings usually are to 
the portraits of political opponents. They were attached to 
the country in which they were not permitted to live with a 

1 Quoted in A'alion, March 31, 1S60. 



RUIN AND RABAGAS 203 

patriotism remarkable for its fervour even among the many- 
passionate patriotisms of the world : and their family ties 
were peculiarly close and strong. A look at the railway 
stations, and then at the fields, of Ireland would have brought 
to any sympathetic eye the inner meaning of the terrible and 
widespread tragedy that was there being enacted. At every 
railway station crowds of people were to be seen locked in 
each other's arms, shouting aloud in their grief, and exchanging 
everlasting farewells. What these partings meant could only 
be understood by those who know and sympathise with the 
home life of the Irish poor. There is perhaps no country in 
the world where the sense of the duty of the members of a 
family to each other is held more sacred. How sacred the 
feeling is receives yearly proof in the vast sums which are 
sent over out of hardly-earned wages by the Irish in America 
to the Irish at home. Then, too, the authority of the head 
of the house is carried in Ireland still to extremes that in 
most countries are as dead and ancient as the other ways 
and ideas of the patriarchal period. As a result, the child 
has less self-confidence at years comparatively mature than 
is acquired in other countries at a much earlier age ; and the 
parent looks at a grown young man 01 woman as having all 
the innocence and helplessness of childhood. The sense of 
separation was, accordingly, terribly embittered by the awful 
apprehension for the future of those children cast on the 
unknown and terrible temptations of the great world. The 
latent sense that was in the mind of the father or mother 
who followed panting and sobbing the train was that the 
engine with its accursed haste was carrying off the loved 
ones to want or vice, to early and painful, or perchance 
shameful death amid strange faces. It was this factor in the 
separation that gave to it much of its poignant grief and 
tragic import. To many a cabin in Ireland emigration meant 
that the light of a life had gone out, and that aged parents 
never more knew a bright or happy hour. 

Over the country is to be seen to this day the marks of 
this dreadful and terrible time. There are many parts of 
Ireland to-day that still look as if they had just been passed 
over by an invading army led by a commander with the 



204 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

spirit of Attila. The traveller can pass for miles through 
some of the best land in the County Meath, and see a 
country on which not a single human being remains ; the 
frequent ruin speaks of a vanished population as effectually 
scattered as the populations of those entombed cities in 
Italy, the ruins of which to-day with such compelling 
silence tell the tale of tumultuous life reduced to stillness 
and death. 

Such, then, was the condition of Ireland in the interval 
between 1855 and 1865. It is one of the saddest and most 
dreadful stories in all history. It is the spectacle, under the 
semblance of law, and without any particular noise, and 
certainly without attracting any particular attention, of an 
ancient and brave nation being slowly but surely wiped out 
of existence. Not a section, or a class, or a percentage, but 
the whole people were being swept away, their land was 
yearly becoming more desolate, and all the probabilities 
pointed to the near advent of the period when the country 
would be one great- sheep and cattle farm with the vast 
desert broken only at long intervals by the herd. 

Meantime the Imperial Parliament looked on and did 
nothing : the rulers declared that the hellish work was good : 
the press of the dominant country hissed out triumphant 
hate ; and popular representation had fallen into the hands of 
self-seekers, heartless, lying, and base. It is in such periods 
that a desperate spirit is evoked and is necessary. The 
masses of the people were still sound, and there were among 
the population chosen spirits who were resolved to show that 
the struggle, which had been maintained through so many 
centuries, was not even yet at an end ; that, if the Irish nation 
were to be murdered, at least her people would try to make 
one final and desperate stand ; and that her political life 
would find other types than the pestilent race of Rabagas. 



205 



CHAPTER VII. 

REVOLUTION. 

I HAVE written very clumsily if the reader, whatever be his 
nationality, does not now understand the forces which pro- 
duced Fenianism. This movement, like many other move- 
ments before and since, took its rise in America, where the 
men evicted under such circumstances as I have described, 
daily brooded over the means whereby they might avenge 
their personal and political wrongs. Meagher and Mitchel, 
after escaping from the penal settlements to which they had 
been condemned after the failure of 1848, supplied the Irish 
of America with names and ability to keep alive and to 
inspire the movement for the rescue of Ireland. To America, 
too, had gone James Stephens, who as a young man had 
stood by Smith O'Brien at Ballingarry. Stephens was in 
Ireland in 1858, and he visited, among other places, the town 
of Skibbereen, in which had been recently established a society 
half literary, half political, and the chief spirit of which was a 
man whose name was destined to be long afterwards a name 
of horror and of fear. This was Jeremiah O'Donovan, as he 
was originally called, and Jeremiah O'Donovan (Rossa) as he 
is now better known. Between O'Donovan and Stephens an 
interview took place, at which Stephens informed O'Donovan 
that the Irish in America were willing and anxious to supply 
arms for insurrection to so many Irishmen as would be en- 
rolled in a revolutionary conspiracy in Ireland. The bargain 
was sealed, and the movement made some way, but was 
confined in its operations to the south-west districts of the 
country. Finally the Government were informed of the 
position of matters, and the conspirators were put on their 
trial. Many of them were convicted, among others O'Donovan 



2o6 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

(Rossa), but the Crown, despising the movement as futile, did 
not insist on heavy punishments being inflicted on any of the 
conspirators. 

The Irish-American revolutionaries now set to work again, 
and the business of propagandism continued to go on actively. 
No particular progress was made, however, and probably the 
movement would not have assumed formidable proportions 
but for the outbreak of the Civil War in America. This 
portentous event brought into actual warfare many thousands 
of the exiled Irish, made them familiar with the use of arms, 
and thereby gave a stimulus to the idea of liberating Ireland 
through insurrection. An accidental occurrence gave the 
propagandists of the revolution an immense start. Terence 
Bellew McManus, one of the '48 leaders, having, like the 
others, escaped from Australia, settled and died in San 
Francisco in 1861. It was resolved that his remains should 
be buried in his native country. The body was conveyed 
across America with every circumstance of pomp and solem- 
nity. To Ireland at last came the funeral procession that had 
thus stalked solemnly across the vast continent and the wide 
expanse of ocean. Such a spectacle was well calculated to 
inspire the imagination and to stimulate the patriotic passions 
of the people. The movement was still further strengthened 
by the opposition which the funeral demonstration received 
from the ecclesiastical authorities. Archbishop Cullen con- 
tinued to the dead conspirator the same hostility which he 
displayed to the living members of secret societies. To him 
it soon became known that the funeral was serving as a 
trumpet-call to gather in recruits for the revolution through 
the country. He refused to allow the body to lie in state in 
any of the churches of his diocese. This added feelings of 
bitter exasperation to all the other forces tending to make 
the funeral a new departure in Irish politics. The coffin was 
landed at Queenstown on October 30, 1861, and the funeral 
took place in Dublin on Sunday, November 10. In this 
interval the country was excited by a fierce controversy 
between the Fenians and Archbishop Cullen, and the con- 
troversy brought recruits in daily larger numbers to the 
revolutionary organisation. At last the funeral wound up in 



. REVOLUTION 207 

a demonstration, which was a fitting close to the preceding 
events. Fifty thousand people followed the remains ; at 
least as many lined the streets ; and the procession solemnly 
paused, with uncovered heads, at every spot sacred to the 
memory of those who had fought and died in the good 
fight against English tyranny : in Thomas Street, at the house 
where Lord Edward Fitzgerald met his death, and the church 
where lie his remains ; at the house in High Street where the 
remains of Wolfe Tone had been laid before removal for 
final interment ; especially opposite the spot where Robert 
Emmet was 'executed. ' In passing the Castle/ says a chro- 
nicler of the period, ' the procession slackened its pace to the 
utmost, and lingered on its way in silent but stern defiance.' 
Finally, as night closed in, the body was deposited in 
Glasnevin Cemetery. 

From this time forward the advance of Fenianism was 
extraordinarily rapid. Organisers went all over the island, 
swearing in men by the dozen, sometimes by the score, every 
night. In one quarter the conspiracy met with unexpected 
and almost inexplicable success. This was in the army. At 
that time there were in Ireland a large number of Irish 
regiments. Several of the ablest of the Fenians became 
soldiers for the purpose of gaining recruits to their ranks. In 
Dublin, anybody who entered unexpectedly one of the many 
taverns along the quays, where soldiers most do congregate, 
might have detected the Fenian organiser at work, swearing 
in batches of soldiers. The most extraordinary stories, few 
of which ever found their way into the papers, are still told 
of the exhibitions which the army at the time made of its 
political sympathies and organisation. It often happened 
that an Irish regiment, passing through a country town, 
cheered loudly, and in the open day, for the Irish Republic. 
It is said that agents of the organisation were introduced by 
members of the conspiracy into every barrack, and were 
familiar with the position of every piece of ordnance through- 
out the country ; and on more than one critical occasion, 
the men in charge of some of the most important military 
stations came to the Fenian leaders and offered them the 
keys of the citadels. The calculations of the Fenians them- 



2 o8 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

selves, even in these days of cool reflection, is that by 1865 
they had enrolled in their ranks, among the British army 
alone, 15,000 men ! 

So far the movement was strong, but it had an incurable 
weakness — the want of arms. At no period- throughout the 
whole conspiracy was there one rifle for every 500 men 
enrolled. The leader of the movement, Mr. Stephens, not 
willing perhaps to betray the weakness of the body over 
which he presided, was gradually forced into promises that 
he found himself unable to fulfil. The moment at last came 
when neither the Government nor the revolutionary leaders 
could any longer escape collision. With the close of the 
American war hundreds of Irish- American officers were 
released from their duties. They poured into Ireland, and 
the air became thick with rumours of the impending rising. 
Meantime the Government were kept well informed of every- 
thing that was going forward by their spies in the enemy's 
camp. The 'Irish People,' the organ of the revolutionaries, 
was seized on September 15, 1865. Mr. Luby, Mr. John 
O'Leary, and O'Donovan (Rossa) were arrested, and in the 
following November Mr. Stephens. Before the latter was 
brought to trial he succeeded, by the aid of two prison 
officials, in escaping from Richmond Gaol. Parliament 
promptly suspended the Habeas Corpus Act, and through- 
out the country the leaders of the movement were seized and 
imprisoned. 

The treatment of these untried prisoners is one of the 
many discreditable events of this period. At this period the 
medical superintendent of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin was Dr. 
Robert MacDonnell, one of the most prominent physicians 
in Dublin ; and he was in charge of many of the men who, 
when the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, were placed 
in this prison. Over and over again he drew the atten- 
tion of the Government to the manner in which these men 
were treated. He described how these prisoners, untried 
and unconvicted, were submitted to a cellular discipline more 
severe in some respects than a convict undergoes while going 
through the-eight months of his probationary treatment. 1 

1 Extract from Report forwarded to the Prisons Office, Dublin Castle, Jan. 
1867, by Dr. R. MacDonnell. 



REVOLUTION 



209 



The prisoners were confined in cells little more than six feet 
square, their meals were handed to them through a hole in the door; 
they were kept rigidly alone, except when at religious services and at 
exercise ; they were not admitted to the companionship of a friend 
or a pipe. 1 

The results of such treatment soon showed themselves in 
many cases. 

Thomas Burke (reported Dr. MacDonnell to the Governor of 
Mountjoy Prison on February 28, 1867) is showing undoubted 
symptoms of insanity ; Finnegan has lately given way to one of those 
paroxysms brought on by long confinement ; Sweeny is very unsettled 
in his mind ; Whyte (lately discharged) was considered unfit for cellular 
discipline ; Barry (also lately discharged) was considered unfit, from 
his mental state, to go away from the prison without some one in 
charge of him. I have not the slightest doubt that the prolonged 
confinement and severe discipline are the cause of all this. Apart from 
considerations of humanity, it would be a very grave matter if any of 
these untried prisoners (particularly anyone like Bourke or Sweeny, 
the former of whom has been twelve, the latter seventeen months in 
confinement) should commit suicide. I beg leave, therefore, to im- 
press on you, as well as the inspector and director, the necessity for 
advocating a relaxed system of treatment for the untried prisoners. 

Attention was called to the matter in the House of Com- 
mons, and there was some relaxation made in the treatment 
of the prisoners. The relaxation consisted in this — 

That untried prisoners, instead of during exercise walking round 
and round in the exercising rings after each other, at regular distances 
and in profound silence, were permitted to walk each with a com- 
panion, to converse, and to smoke. All the rest of the twenty-four 
hours, save during exercise, they were in strict cellular confinement. 
They were, it is true, permitted under certain restrictions to receive 
visits from their friends ; but most of them, coming from remote 
parts of Ireland, had no friends to visit them, and this privilege was 
practically useless to most of them. 

In time, some of these prisoners were brought to trial. 
Then occurred the spectacle of such ghastly familiarity to 
the student of Irish history. The criminal courts at Green 
Street and throughout the country were for months employed 

1 From a paper read by Dr. MacDonnell before the National Society of 
Dublin, July 4, 1871. 



2io THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

in the trial of prisoners, and man after man was convicted 
and sentenced to penal servitude. 

It was one of the many scandals in these trials that the 
most prominent judge in trying them was Judge Keogh. Of 
all men and forces that created Fenianism, Judge Keogh was 
the most potent. It was his treason that broke down all faith 
in constitutional agitation, and it was the want of faith in 
constitutional agitation that drove men to the desperate risks 
to life and liberty of a physical-force movement. It was the 
treason of Judge Keogh that, destroying the Tenant Right 
movement of 1852, brought the dread epoch of rack-renting, 
eviction, and widespread emigration, and it was the horrors 
of these things that produced the frenzied temper of which 
revolutionary movements are born. The columns of the ' Irish 
People,' the organ of Fenianism, supply abundant testimony of 
this. Whenever a voice was raised in favour of constitutional 
agitation and constitutional agitators, the ' Irish People ' men- 
tioned the names of Keogh and Sadleir, and there was no reply. 
And Judge Keogh was selected by the Government to try 
the editor and contributors of the ' Irish People ! ' This is 
the place to add that, since his accession to the bench, Judge 
Keogh had exhausted every resource to exacerbate the 
feelings of anger and scorn his political career had created. 
It is another of the many distinctions between the Irish and 
the English judiciary that the English judge ceases, while 
the Irish judge continues to be an active politician after his 
elevation to the bench. In times of political excitement 
the Irish judge is in the regular habit of making political 
pronouncements. They take the form of laments over the 
perils to law and order ; in reality they are intended to de- 
feat the movement towards the advance of popular rights. 
Cases are twisted in a curious fashion into pegs on which to 
hang pronouncements on both political and religious questions, 
and ■ the pronouncements are usually violently partisan in 
temper, vehement in tone. In any trial in which the autho- 
rities stand on one side and the people on the other, impar- 
tiality is never found. The judge is as eager, as unscrupu- 
lous in the pursuit of a conviction as the Crown prosecutor 
himself. It is a peculiarity of the British system in Ireland 
that abuses exist in that country to-day which belong to a 



REVOLUTION 211 

political condition that perished two centuries ago in England. 
And it is another and characteristic peculiarity that abuses 
which in England are spoken of with ever-fresh horror and 
disgust as the worst features of a bad and irrevocable past, 
find unmixed eulogiums when the Ireland of Queen Victoria, 
and not the England of James IT., is the scene of their occur- 
rence. The nation that still shudders over Judge Jeffries 
was always sympathetic to Judge Keogh. 

Of the race of political judges Keogh was the worst 
offender. It seemed to be the peculiar pleasure of his ill- 
regulated nature to single out for attack the most devoted 
servants of the people he had ruined. And there was nothing 
to which he was more aggressive than the religious faith on 
which he had so ostentatiously traded, or the hierarchy which 
had been his ladder to power. Sometimes it was in a charge 
from the bench, sometimes in a popular speech, or a literary 
lecture — any opportunity he seized hold of to have a sneer at 
the Catholic Church ; and to a Catholic bis"hop or priest he was 
merciless in his hatred and scorn. These attacks were rendered 
the harder to bear because they were generally couched in 
language at once studiously insulting and characteristically 
vulgar, for he remained to the end the low demagogue, at 
once pretentious and illiterate, execrable in taste, vile in style. 

The original scandal of appointing such a man to preside 
over the Fenian trials was aggravated by his conduct of the 
cases. He bullied the prisoners so flagrantly that at last 
some even of the English press cried shame. And occa- 
sionally he poured upon some unhappy creature he was about 
to send to penal servitude for several years the plenteous 
vials of his abundant Billingsgate. Meantime, the Irish people 
looked on shocked, enraged, impotent ; naturally loathing 
with greater cordiality the system which placed infamy on the 
bench and honesty in the dock, that permitted the perjured 
assassin of their hopes to draft to the horrors of penal servitude 
the spirits he himself had summoned from the vasty deep 
of a nation's despair. The English newspapers naturally had 
no eyes for such a phenomenon : they were too busy with 
dissertating on the despatch of French Republicans to 
Cayenne or Polish patriots to Siberia. 



212 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

But the conspiracy was not yet dead. The men in 
America still cherished the idea that an armed rising was 
necessary and possible, and sent encouraging messages home. 
Stephens publicly pledged himself that there would be a 
rising in 1866. 1866 went by, and no insurrection came. At 
last the conductors of the movement at home became des- 
perate, and it was resolved that, whether assistance came 
from America or not, the insurrection should be attempted. 
Sporadic efforts occurred all over the country ; men assembled 
to the word of command, and met at the trysting-place, but 
they found no arms there, and were easily dispersed. 

Another series of State trials followed, at which the chief 
spirits of the movement were again sentenced in batches to 
penal servitude. The movement was now apparently extinct, 
but before its conclusion it was marked by two incidents that 
have exercised a deep influence on succeeding events. Much 
of the strength of Fenianism lay among the Irish population 
of England, and emissaries were constantly passing between 
the two countries. It thus came to pass that some of the 
leaders were arrested and lodged in English gaols. One of 
these, General Burke, was incarcerated in Clerkenwell prison. 
It was resolved that he should be rescued. The task was 
entrusted to ignorant hands. A barrel of gunpowder was 
placed in a narrow street by the side of the wall in that part 
of the prison where General Burke was supposed to be 
exercising. The wall was blown down. The prisoner, fortu- 
nately for himself, was not in that portion of the prison at 
all ; if he had been, his death would have been certain. A num- 
ber of unfortunate people of the poorer classes, living in tene- 
ment houses opposite the prison, were the victims. Twelve 
were killed and a hundred and twenty maimed. This occurred 
on December 13, 1867. A man named Barrett was tried 
and convicted, and was hanged in front of Newgate prison. 

The second event brought out with equal emphasis the 
hold which the insurrectionary movement had taken upon 
the Irish in England, and the reality and proportions of the 
danger to the empire. The conduct of the movement had 
passed, after the arrest of Stephens, and during his absence 
in America, into the hands of Colonel Kelly. In the autumn 



REVOLUTION 213 

of 1867 Colonel Kelly was in Manchester, at a Fenian 
meeting. As he was returning home with a companion, 
Captain Deasy, the two were arrested on suspicion of 
loitering for a burglarious purpose. They gave false names, 
but were soon discovered to be the formidable leader of the 
conspiracy and one of his chief lieutenants. The Fenian or- 
ganisation was at the time extremely strong in Manchester, 
and a rescue was resolved upon. On Wednesday, Sep- 
tember 18, the prison van, while being driven to the county 
gaol at Salford, was attacked at the railway arch which spans 
Hyde Road at Bellevue. A party of thirty rushed forward 
with revolvers, shot one of the horses, and the police being 
unarmed, fled. An attempt was made to open the door of 
the van with hatchets, hammers, and crowbars, but this 
failed ; and meantime the police came back, accompanied by 
a large crowd. Sergeant Brett, the policeman inside, had 
the keys, which some of the party, opening the ventilator, 
asked him to give up. *He refused ; a pistol was placed to 
the keyhole for the purpose of blowing open the lock ; the 
bullet passed through Brett's body, and he fell, mortally 
wounded. The keys were taken out of his pocket and 
handed out by one of the female prisoners, Kelly and Deasy 
were released, and hurried off into concealment, and were 
never recaptured. Meantime a crowd had gathered, several 
of the rescuing party were seized and almost lynched ; one of 
them, William Philip Allen, was almost stoned to death. 
Soon after William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, Thomas 
Maguire, Michael O'Brien (alias Gould), and Edward O'Meara 
Condon (alias Shore) were tried for the wilful murder of 
Sergeant Brett. They were convicted, and all sentenced to 
beJianged. The trial took place amid a hurricane of public 
passion and panic. The evidence was tainted, and was soon 
unexpectedly proved to be utterly untrustworthy. Thomas 
Maguire, tried on the same evidence, identified by the same 
witnesses, convicted and sentenced by the same judges, was 
proved so conclusively innocent that he was released a few 
days after his trial. Allen and the others declared solemnly 
that they had not intended to hurt Sergeant Brett. Condon, 
in speaking, used a phrase that has become historic : ' I have 



214 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

nothing,' he said, in concluding his speech, ' to regret or to 
take back. I can only say, " God save Ireland."' ' His com- 
panions advanced to the front of the dock, and, raising their 
hands, repeated the cry, ' God save Ireland.' Maguire was 
released and Condon was reprieved. For some time there 
was a hope that the breakdown of the trial in the case of 
Maguire would result in a reprieve in the cases of the other 
three. But the authorities ultimately decided that the three 
men should be hanged, and on the morning of November 23, 
1867, Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien were executed in front 
of Salford gaol. A short time afterwards their bodies were 
buried in quicklime, in unconsecrated ground, within the 
precincts of the prison. 

It is impossible, even after the considerable interval that 
has elapsed, to forget the impression which this event pro- 
duced upon the Irish people. In most of the towns in Ireland 
vast multitudes walked in funeral processions through the 
streets to testify the terrible depths of their grief, and for 
taking part in one of these processions, and for his comments 
in his newspapers upon the execution, the late Mr. A. M. 
Sullivan, with the late John Martin, was tried. The charge for 
taking part in an illegal procession was not successful ; but 
of the offence of seditious writing Mr. Sullivan was convicted, 
and he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. The 
execution of Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien added one more to 
the countless wrongs of Ireland. Men speak to-day of it 
with almost the same frenzied bitterness as at the moment 
when it took place. A few days after the execution, Mr. T. D. 
Sullivan wrote the poem with the refrain uttered from the 
dock, ' God save Ireland ! ' and wherever in any part of the 
globe there is now an assembly of Irishmen, social or poli- 
tical — a concert in Dublin, a convention at Chicago, or a 
Parliamentary dinner in London, the proceedings regularly 
close with the singing of ' God save Ireland.' 

To one Irishman, then a youth, living in the country- 
house of his fathers, and deeply immersed in the small con- 
cerns of a squire's daily life, the execution of the Manchester 
martyrs was a new birth of political convictions. To him, 
brooding from his early days over the history of his country, 



REVOLUTION 215 

this catastrophe came to crystallise impressions into con- 
viction and to pave the way from dreams to action. It 
was the execution of Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien that gave 
Mr. Parnell to the service of Ireland. 

An indirect effect of all these startling occurrences was to 
force the attention of the English people-and their Parliament 
upon the Irish- question. In other words, the evils that had 
been allowed to eat out the vitals of Ireland for so long a 
period amid apathy tempered by scoffs, began to attract 
attention when Irishmen abandoned the paths of constitu- 
tional and tranquil agitation, and sought remedy in conspiracy 
and force. By several circumstances the Irish Church was 
pushed to the front, and the Irish Members began to actively 
discuss it in Parliament. They spoke to an audience that was 
for the most part deaf or inattentive. But the signs of gra- 
dually approaching light began to grow more frequent, and 
the progress of an intelligent comprehension of the Irish 
question was by a sinister coincidence in exact measure with 
the progress of the signs of insurrection. Mr. Gladstone was 
the finger-post of English feeling throughout that period. 
The movement against the Irish Church was in the hands of 
a man of commanding ability, of lengthened political experi- 
ence, and of marvellous industry. This was Sir John Gray. 
Sir John Gray had been one of the lieutenants of O'Connell in 
the great Repeal agitation ; had been tried with him as one of 
the traversers in 1843 ; and had from that period onwards 
been one of the most conspicuous and active politicians in 
Ireland. He was among the chief founders of the Tenant 
League ; and when the treason of Keogh broke that organisa- 
tion up, and rendered all constitutional movements impossible 
in Ireland for a considerable interval, Gray devoted himself to 
the ' Freeman's Journal,' of which he was proprietor, and to 
the municipal affairs of Dublin. He gave to the Irish metro- 
polis the best water supply of almost any city in the world, and 
was knighted for his services by Lord Carlisle. In 1 865 there 
seemed at last some sign of resurrection in the constitutional 
agitation, and Gray was returned for the city of Kilkenny. 
The Irish Church question was one with which he had 
always been familiar, and with which he was probably better 



2i6 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

acquainted than any man in Ireland or England. His first step 
was to appoint a commission in connection with his news- 
paper, and the report of the ' Freeman's Journal ' became the 
text-book of the assailants of the Irish Church. On April 10, 
1866, Sir John Gray attacked the Church. In the previous 
year a similar motion had been made by Mr. Dillwyn. The 
Ministry had opposed the motion, but Mr. Gladstone had 
spoken ambiguous words that did not signify obstinate hos- 
tility to the proposal. Mr. Chichester Fortescue (Lord Car- 
lington), then Chief Secretary for Ireland, was still more 
encouraging ; and he went so far as to wish the movement 
against the Irish Church ' God speed.' Soon after came an 
event which was destined more than almost any other to 
accelerate the advance of the movement at lightning speed. 
This was the fall of the Russell-Gladstone Ministry in the 
June of 1866. 

But still something else was required to drive the Liberal 
leader from his last hesitations. In April, 1867, Sir John Gray 
again brought forward his motion, and again the tone of 
Mr. Gladstone was one of hesitancy. He was on the brink of 
the Rubicon, but he had not yet the courage to cross the 
stream. He himself has told us in memorable words the event 
that finally gave strength to his warring soul, and made him 
plunge into steps that were irrevocable. 

What happened in the case of the Irish Church ? (he said). That 
down to the year 1865, the whole question of the Irish Church was 
dead ; nobody cared for it, nobody paid attention to it in England. 
Circumstances occurred which drew the attention of people to the 
Irish Church. I said myself it was out of the range of practical 
politics— that is, politics of the coming election. When it came to 
this, that a great gaol in the heart of the metropolis was broken open 
under circumstances which drew the attention of English people to 
the state of Ireland, and when a Manchester policeman was murdered 
in the exercise of his duty, at once the whole country became alive 
to Irish questions, and the question of the Irish Church revived. 1 

' A subsequent explanation is scarcely more happy nor less truthful. ' I did 
say,' said Mr. Gladstone, ' it was out of the range of practical politics, by which 
I meant it was on the occasion of an election ; and when at an election you say 
that a question is out of the range of practical politics, you mean it is not a ques- 
tion likely to be dealt with in the Parliament you are now choosing. That is the 



REVOLUTION 217 

Everybody knows the bitter controversy which has ever 
since raged over these words. Into that controversy it were 
bootless here to enter. The words have often been a stum- 
bling-block in the way of the constitutional Irish agitator. For 
what argument that he could bring forward in favour of the 
superiority of his method could hold against the recommenda- 
tion in favour of the weapons of revolution and violence given 
by an English Prime Minister ? The lamentable fact about the 
controversy, however, is that it misses so frequently its real 
point. It is not really important whether Mr. Gladstone 
should have made this confession ; the point of real import- 
ance is, whether his statement was true or not. Who can 
doubt its truth? And if the statement be unquestionably 
true, what strange reflections it ought to cause to those who 
maintain the state of relations between England and Ireland, 
that refuses all concession to reason and constitutional 
methods, and then sweeps reform into the Irish lap with the 
generosity of Cornucopia when the demand is made in the 
name of armed men and open violence. 

The Disestablishment of the Irish Church produced far 
other consequences than perhaps its authors intended. For 
the first time in many years the Irish constituencies beheld 
the spectacle of an English Parliament occupied in the work 
of redressing Irish grievances, and the wrongs of Ireland were 
depicted, and not mocked at, by Ministers of the English 
Crown. This turned attention once more to parliamentary 
methods ; the spirit of apathy, which had given the fruits ot 

meaning of it. It was said, and truly said, that in the year 1867 there happemd 
certain crimes in England — that is to say, a policeman was murdered in circum- 
stances of riot and great excitement at Manchester ; the wall of Clerkenwell 
Prison was blown down in a very alarming manner — in consequence of which, it 
was said, I changed my mind about the Irish Church. Now, what I have said, 
and what I repeat, is that the matters referred to had the effect of drawing the 
attention of the people of this island to the Irish Question. ... I will give you 
an illustration. Suppose it is Sunday morning, and I have got up and have had 
my breakfast, and perhaps I am reading a book in which I am interested — let us 
hope it is a proper and becoming book for the day — and I am not thinking of 
going to church for the moment, because I am so interested in the book that I am 
not conscious of the exact time, when suddenly I hear the church bell. Well, the 
church bell reminds me, and I put my book down, put on my hat, and go to 
church. Would you say the church bell is the cause why I go to church ? Not 
in the least. I go to church because I believe it to be my duty to go to church. ' 



2iS THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

these contests without care or regret to the first adventurer, 
was broken, and people began to think again that it was of 
some importance whether an honest man or a rogue should be 
sent to Westminster to represent Ireland. The awakening of 
Ireland from the long slumber since 1845 na -d begun, and 
the awakening of Ireland means the revival of an agitation 
for self-government. 

A movement springing from Fenianism lent strength 
to the growing spirit of the country. The confession of 
Mr. Gladstone, the admission by Parliament itself that Ire- 
land had been suffering from intolerable grievances, naturally 
led to the idea that men who had risked and lost their liberty 
to remedy these grievances should not be any longer kept in 
punishment. From this idea started the Amnesty movement. 
In the eyes of the Irish people the men — many of them of 
good social position, of stainless moral character, of lofty 
courage and temper — were just as much heroes as to the 
English people were the men who had displayed the same 
virtues in the search for Italian or Polish or Hungarian liberty. 
The Amnesty movement accordingly assumed vast propor- 
tions in a very short time ; imposing demonstrations were 
held all over Ireland ; and the spirit of the country once more 
became active and hopeful. But the Ministers still hesitated 
to release the pioneers who had led the way to reform, and 
the demands for amnesty met with a blank refusal. This 
increased the feeling in favour of the imprisoned men, and at 
last the country found an opportunity of giving utterance 
to its feelings. A vacancy occurred in County Tipperary. 
Mr. Denis Caulfield Heron sought election as a Liberal. 
But Mr. Heron was a barrister — one of the class of Catholic 
place-hunters who properly occupy the lowest place in the 
Inferno of the Irish Nationalist. It was resolved that he 
should be opposed by O'Donovan Rossa, whose stubborn 
resistance to the terrors of penal servitude had trickled out to 
the general public ; and O'Donovan Rossa was returned by a 
large majority. He was, of course, immediately declared to 
be disqualified as a felon. 

The next move that gave indication of the new birth in 
the country was the Longford election. Colonel Greville- 



REVOLUTION 219 

Nugent, in December, 1 869, was elevated to the peerage by Mr. 
Gladstone, and the representation of Longford county became 
vacant. At once one of his younger sons, Captain Reginald 
Greville-Nugent, was put forward as a candidate for the 
vacancy. The new peer was personally and deservedly very 
popular. He was a good landlord, and he had fought for years 
in favour of tenant right and for reforms. His son was the 
candidate of the then universally popular Prime Minister who 
had already passed one Act of reform for Ireland and was busy 
in the preparation of another. But the Nationalists were deter- 
mined that the time had passed for any longer paltering with 
the question of self-government, and resolved to accept no 
candidate save one who would demand the restoration of the 
Irish Parliament. At first there was an idea of imitating the 
example of County Tipperary, and putting forward one of the 
Fenian prisoners — Mr. Thomas Clarke Luby. But by this 
time the fierce resentment at the refusal to release the political 
prisoners had resolved itself into the cool purpose of utilising 
the parliamentary platform for advancing the national cause. 
Eyes were naturally turned towards Mr. John Martin, the 
pure patriot of transparent honesty, who through all the 
years of changing fortune, and of almost unbroken disaster 
from his early days of abortive revolution, had clung without 
one moment's interruption to the cause of self-government. 
This led to one of the fiercest and most memorable electoral 
contests in Irish history. The Catholic clergy took up the 
cause of Captain Greville-Nugent with zeal, and on his behalf 
large sums of money were lavishly spent. There were violent 
collisions throughout the county, and after a contest of almost 
unexampled bitterness, Captain Greville-Nugent was returned 
by an overwhelming majority, to be shortly afterwards 
unseated on the ground of clerical intimidation. 

Meantime, another movement had been going forward, 
which was destined to add a new and even more potent force 
to the growing cause of self-government. Though the Church 
question had been pushed to the front, the Land question still 
retained its place as the supreme issue to the majority of 
the population. The attention of England, directed to Ire- 
land, had been turned to the land as well as to the other 



220 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

grievances from which the country was suffering, and public 
opinion in England had reached in 1868 to that stage to 
which the public opinion of Ireland had reached at least half 
a century before. By a fortunate coincidence a great catas- 
trophe happened to occur at this psychological moment 
which demonstrated the meaning of the Irish land system in 
a manner so flagrant that the blindest must see. The estate 
of Ballycohey had fallen some years before into the hands of 
Mr. William Scully. Mr. Scully was a member of the family 
which had as its chief representative Mr. John Sadleir, who 
was brother of one and cousin of another of the Scullys 
whom Sadleir's influence had returned as members of Parlia- 
ment in 1852. The tenants paid high rents, mostly paid 
punctually, and were described on all sides as industrious, 
thrifty, and well-behaved. But Mr. Scully was not a man 
to be satisfied with the mere punctual payment of rent. A 
tenant who was not also a serf did not reach his idea of the 
true relations between the owner and the occupier of the soil. 
His ideas on this point and his characteristic feeling had been 
sufficiently brought into relief by his previous career. No 
less than twice he had been tried on charges of brutal 
violence against his tenants, and the violence had been 
employed in the work of carrying out evictions. In 1 849 — that 
dread year when the universal misery of the Irish nation 
might be considered a sufficient protection against any further 
misery — in the year 1849, Mr. Scully was tried at the 
Clonmel assizes on the charge of shooting two young men, 
whose father he was evicting. He was acquitted ; but less 
fortunate on the second occasion, he was convicted and 
sentenced to twelvemonths' imprisonment with hard labour, 
at the summer assizes of Kilkenny in 1865. He had beaten 
and wounded the wife of one of his tenants while breaking 
into his house in the middle of the night for the purpose of 
serving a notice or making a seizure. The Ballycohey tenants 
were not long in finding the worst fears realised which their 
change of master had excited. Mr. Scully proposed for their 
acceptance a form of lease which contained terms of almost 
incredible harshness. ' The tenants were always to have a 
half-year's rent paid in advance ; to pay the rent quarterly ; 



REVOLUTION 221 

to surrender in twenty-one days' notice at the end of any 
quarter ; to forego all claims in their own crops that might be 
in the soil ; and they were to pay all rates and taxes what- 
soever.' Everybody who did not accept this lease was to be 
evicted. 

Early in June, 1868, Mr. Scully ordered his tenants to come 
into Dobbyn's hotel, in the town of Tipperary with their May 
rent. In the hotel he awaited their arrival, a loaded re- 
volver on each side of him and an armed policeman close 
by. He had also close to him a supply of the leases and of 
notices to quit, and the tenant, as he paid his rent, was to have 
his choice between the signature of the one or the receipt of 
the other. The tenants, suspecting the existence of such a 
plan, sent in their rent — except in four cases — by deputy, 
by their wives or sons. Mr. Scully now declared open war, 
and took out ejectment processes. These processes had to 
be served personally. Mr. Scully was warned by everybody 
that such work could not be 'carried out without the risk of 
bloodshed, but he resolved to go forward. His first attempt 
— made on Tuesday, August 11, 1868 — failed. The tenants, 
for the most part, abandoned their houses, and an angry 
crowd attacked the police and pursued them back into the 
town of Tipperary. On the following Friday Mr. Scully 
again renewed the attempt ; again he failed before the deter- 
mination of the populace, and was returning home in discom- 
fiture, when his attention was attracted by the house of John 
Dwyer — one of his tenants — whose situation seemed to invite 
attack. It turned out that the house had been carefully pre- 
pared for attack. Mr. Scully and his companions were received 
with a volley from inside. Mr. Scully and some of his com- 
panions were severely wounded ; Gorman, a land-bailiff, and 
Morrow, a sub-constable of police, were killed. 

This tragic incident aroused a storm of indignation against 
Mr. Scully and the land system which permitted such horrors, 
and as Mr. A. M. Sullivan writes, it ' passed the Irish Land 
Act of 1 870.' The reader, however, will not fail to notice that, 
brutal as are the circumstances, the Ballycohey evictions do 
not approach in elements of horror and cruelty many evic- 
tion scenes which have been described in preceding pages, 



222 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

and which excited either no attention 'among the English 
people, or the attention only of contempt, and which were 
allowed by the English Legislature to go on from year to year, 
and sometimes by tens of thousands in a single year, as one 
of the misunderstood blessings of English rule to the Irish 
people. 

In Ireland, meantime, all things tended to rouse the 
people to one of those periodical movements of tempestuous 
passion and united strength for the liberation of the people 
from intolerable tyranny. Throughout the country mass 
meetings were held, and the demand of the farmers was put 
forward with thundrous emphasis. Sir John Gray had made 
himself the parliamentary leader of this, as of the movement 
against the Irish Church, and his activity at this time was 
phenomenal. There was scarcely a part of Ireland in which 
he did not address the now thoroughly aroused farmers. The 
demand put forward was for the ' Three F's ' — fixity of tenure, 
free sale, and fair rent ; and the farmers had heard this demand 
advocated so often, had shouted themselves hoarse by so many 
hillsides in uttering it, had been so stimulated and encouraged 
by the sight of their battalions in regular array, Sunday after 
Sunday, and in county after county, that by the time Parlia- 
ment met they regarded the ' Three F's ' as having already 
passed from the region of popular platforms to that of parlia- 
mentary debates and of statute law. 

The introduction of Mr. Gladstone's Bill was the mournful 
awakening that came to all these splendid dreams. The 
measure of the Prime Minister stopped far short indeed of the 
' Three F's ' ; not satisfied, too, with refusing to grant these 
boons demanded by a unanimous Ireland, the Prime Minister 
exhausted all the resources of his limitless rhetoric and infinite 
subtlety in proving that these demands meant robbery of the 
landlords and ruin to the tenants. 

Sir John Gray and other Irish representatives in vain 
protested against the measure as being either just, or practical, 
or final. They were drowned in the whirlwind of the Prime 
Minister's orations or in the smaller gusts from the mouths of 
his obedient supporters. One and all agreed, above all other 
things, that the measure was final. 



REVOLUTION 



223 



When the division came on the second reading of the Bill, 
the party of the extremists — as they were called — dwindled 
to the most miserable proportions, and the Land Bill passed 
its second reading by 442 to 11. Thirteen, including tellers, 
had voted against the Land Bill of 1870 as a final settle- 
ment of the Irish Land question. 

If any further proof were required, in the then temper of 
Ireland, of the incurable folly and incapacity of the British 
Parliament, it was supplied by its action on the Land question 
in 1 870. The sentimental forces which had been gathering in 
such might in favour of self-government were now materi- 
ally increased by the accession of the mighty battalions of 
the disillusioned and disappointed farmers of the country. 
The movement had its leader ready. 

Throughout the Land agitation, Mr. Isaac Butt had been 
careful to impress steadily upon the farmers that, if their hopes 
were entirely centred on Mr. Gladstone or on the English 
Parliament, their hopes were doomed to disappointment. To 
these words of his additional significance was given by the com- 
manding position to which he was gradually attaining in the 
country. He had taken a prominent part in the defence of the 
Fenian prisoners throughout the long and hopeless struggles 
against conviction at the State trials. This had brought 
him back to the recollection of the generation to whom his 
achievements in the days of O'Connell were but forgotten 
tales. Into the Amnesty movement, which immediately 
followed, he had thrown himself with all his force. It was a 
movement from which the greater number of the Irish repre- 
sentatives kept cautiously aloof, and Butt was thus practically 
its only prominent and noteworthy figure. The Bill of Mr. 
Gladstone had fulfilled the prophecies of Mr. Butt, and the 
farmers of Ireland were now, with the rest of the country, a 
solid mass, asking him to lead them in a movement that 
would make the destinies of Ireland independent of the folly 
of English Ministers and the ignorance of English parlia- 
ments. 

But the foundation of the Home Rule movement, curiously 
enough, was laid, not in obedience to the impulse of the 
masses of the people, but in the rancour of a small and a 



224 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

defeated minority of the population. The Disestablishment of 
the Church had brought back a certain proportion of the Protes- 
tant population to that spirit of nationality which had found 
its most eloquent advocates in the exclusively Protestant 
Parliament of the ante-Union days. A certain number of very 
moderate gentlemen of the Catholic faith saw in a movement 
which Protestant Conservatives were able to support elements 
which need not alarm the most milk-and-water adherents of 
the doctrine of Nationality. There were more stable elements 
in constitutional agitators, who had fought doggedly on for a 
Native Parliament through the long eclipse of national faith 
between 1855 and that hour, like Mr» A. M. Sullivan ; and in 
some men— such as Mr. O'Kelly, M.P. for Roscommon — who, 
appearing under disguised names, sought, after the break- 
down of their efforts to free Ireland by force, whether there 
was any chance of success through parliamentary action. The 
latter element took up this attitude at that period with a cer- 
tain amount of trepidation and at some personal risk ; for the 
distrust of constitutional agitation and the hatred of consti- 
tutional agitators still survived among the relics of Fenianism, 
and the new movement was looked upon by them with the 
same latent and perilous distrust as all its predecessors. The 
meeting was held on May 19, 1870, in the Bilton Hotel, 
Sackville Street, Dublin. The very place of meeting was 
suggestive of the change that had come over the spirit of the 
times, for the Bilton Hotel was known for many years as the 
sacred home of the landlords, of their bishops, their clergy, and 
their other supporters. The condition of the same place to- 
day indicates the far greater change that has come over 
Ireland since 1870, for the Bilton now lies empty and idle, 
with mud-bespattered windows, its patrons swept away in the 
avalanche of 1880. 

At this meeting were present Conservatives as well known 
as Mr. Purdon, then Conservative Lord Mayor of Dublin ; 
Mr. Kinahan, who had been High Sheriff ; and Major Knox, 
proprietor of the ' Irish Times,' a Conservative organ ; nor 
should the name be omitted of a gentleman who was for a 
considerable time to play a prominent part in the new move- 
merit — Colonel, then Captain Edward R. King-Harman. Mr. 



REVOLUTION 225 

Butt was the chief speaker, and on his proposition, and 
without a dissentient voice, the resolution was passed, ' That 
it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the 
evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish parliament 
with full control over our domestic affairs.' A new organisa- 
tion was founded under the name of ' The Home Government 
Association of Ireland.' The Association put forward a com- 
plete scheme. The arrangements for the future relations 
between England and Ireland were to be on the federal plan — 
Ireland to be exclusively mistress of Irish affairs, and the 
Imperial Parliament to have sole control over purely imperial 
affairs. Before long, the movement spread with the rapidity 
which always comes to movements founded on indestructible 
aspirations. Now, just as in 1843, the people had only to see 
a movement in favour of self-government to flock enthusiasti- 
cally to its ranks. The long torpor that had followed the 
famine and Judge Keogh had at last passed away. The 
new life inspired by Fenianism had been made more vital by 
the destruction of the Irish Church, the first assault on the 
uncontrolled despotism of the landlords, and the many kindly 
sentiments — not yet explained away — in the Lancashire 
speeches of Mr. Gladstone. Then the Prime Minister had 
passed another measure which transcended in importance any 
other of the great Acts which made his first Premiership so 
momentous an epoch in the resurrection of Ireland. This 
was the Ballot Act. For the first time in his history the Irish 
tenant could vote without the fear of eviction, with the atten- 
dant risks of hunger, exile, or death. The Ballot Act was an 
act of emancipation to the Irish tenant in a sense far more 
real than the Emancipation Act of 1829. From the passage 
of that Ballot Act is to be dated the era when, for the first 
time in her history, the real voice of Ireland had some oppor- 
tunity of making itself heard. The new force advanced 
against all opponents, and every constituency that had its 
choice declared with unfaltering fidelity in favour of the 
National candidate. Four bye-elections gave the new organ- 
isation an opportunity of testing its strength. John Martin, 
defeated in Longford, stood for the county of Meath. There 



226 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

again he was opposed by the Catholic clergy, who before the 
announcement of his candidature had seemed to find in the 
Hon. Mr. Plunket, brother of Lord Fingal, a popular aristo- 
crat, the most suitable of candidates. But Mr. Martin was 
triumphantly returned. It was regarded in those days — how 
far off they seem now ! — as another signal victory when 
Mr. Mitchell Henry was returned as the Home Rule member 
for the county of Galway, and that Mr. P. J. Smyth was 
elected for the county of Westmeath. Mr. Butt himself was, 
in 1 87 1, returned without any opposition for the city of 
Limerick. 

But the party of Whiggery was not yet willing to acknow- 
ledge the completeness of its defeat. The final struggle took 
place in the county of Kerry. That county had for genera- 
tions been represented by the eldest son of the Earl of Ken- 
mare, the Viscount Castlerosse. The death of Lord Kenmare, 
in December 1871, left a vacancy. At that period the idea 
of opposing in the county of Kerry the nominee of its most 
distinguished and most powerful family seemed little short of 
madness ; but the Home Rulers, confident in their growing 
strength, determined to put the people to the test, and they 
were supposed to have been peculiarly fortunate in finding 
their standard-bearer in the person of a young Protestant 
Irish landlord, Mr. Rowland P. Blennerhassett. The other 
side was represented by a man marked out with equal suita- 
bility as the best mouthpiece of his political creed. Mr. James 
Arthur Dease, the Whig candidate, was an Irish landlord of 
ancient family, of considerable talents and of stainless* cha- 
racter, and was a Catholic in religion. Thus the Whig candi- 
date had every advantage that could recommend him to an Irish 
constituency outside his politics, while his opponent differed 
from them in everything but his political faith. But it is one 
of the differences between England and Ireland that the Irish 
people have advanced infinitely farther on the road of re- 
ligious toleration ; a difference in creed in a man of congenial 
politics is not so much forgiven as not even thought of; and 
Mr. Blennerhassett's creed was, if anything, an advantage, as 
showing a readiness to step out from the ranks of hereditary 
enemies and class prejudices, while the blackness of Mr. Dease's 



REVOLUTION 227 

political guilt was intensified by its apostasy from his natural 
alliances and natural training. The contest was rendered more 
unequal by the fact that behind the Catholic Whig were 
arrayed all the mighty forces of the ecclesiastical authorities 
The Bishop of Kerry at that period was Dr. Moriarty, a man 
of great abilities, high culture, and an unflinching and fearless 
advocate of Whiggery. He was the prelate who, during the 
Fenian movement, declared that hell was not hot enough nor 
eternity long enough to punish such miscreants. But the 
popular forces bore all before them, fought and conquered the 
influence of the landlords, and of the bishop and clergy, and 
Mr. Blennerhassett was returned. In County Galway had 
been proceeding a contest almost equally noteworthy. Captain 
(now Colonel) Nolan had been opposed by Major Trench, a 
member of the Clancarty family. In this case the popular 
candidate was supported by the priests, and the Protestant 
Conservative, on the other hand, was backed by all the influ- 
ence of the landlords without distinction of creed. The 
contest was fought out with great bitterness, and resulted in a 
victory for Captain Nolan. 1 The struggle between Whiggery 

1 Captain Nolan's return was petitioned against : Judge Keogh was the judge 
who tried the petition, and his judgment was one of his latest and most character- 
istic utterances. He unseated Captain Nolan on the ground of clerical intimida- 
1 ion, and this decision was announced in a judgment that occupied several hours 
■n delivery, and was full of the most extraordinary Billingsgate. The judgment 
produced the greatest satisfaction in England, and the Judge, during a brief visit 
to London, was a social lion, Sir Henry James being one of his chief patrons. 
In Ireland — such is the community of sentiment between the two countries — the 
judgment produced an outburst of the fiercest wrath. Its outrageous insults 
against bishops and priests, offensive in any man, were felt the more bitterly as 
coming from the traitor who had been helped by bishops and priests to be suc- 
cessful in his treason. He was burnt in effigy throughout the country, his life was 
daily threatened, and the national passion gave even more substantial proof of its 
intensity, for in the course of a few weeks the sum of about 14,000/. was raised to 
pay the election expenses of Captain Nolan. This will be the place to tell the 
end of Judge Keogh. In the year 1878 the sensational rumour reached Dublin 
that he had developed symptoms of insanity in Belgium, whither he had been 
removed for the benefit of his health, and that he had attempted to murder his 
attendant himself. The rumour proved correct. From this period forth he seems 
never to have recovered full possession of his senses, and gradually sank. He 
was removed to Bingen, and there died on September 30, 1878. An English- 
man, with characteristic appreciation of Irish character, is said to have Disced a 



228 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

and Home Rule was now over. Ireland had definitely 
declared for the new leader and the new movement. 

stone over his remains with the inscription, i Justnm et tenacem pi-opositi vimm? 
The country which he had betrayed and ruined, on the other hand, congratulated 
itself in not having received his remains. Indeed, some desperate spirits had 
resolved that the body should never rest in hallowed ground ; a plot was complete 
for seizing the body during the funeral and throwing it into the Liffey. 



229 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ISAAC BUTT. 

ISAAC Butt was the son of a Protestant clergyman of the 
North of Ireland. He claimed descent from Berkeley, and 
this partly accounted for the devotion to metaphysical 
studies which characterised him throughout his busy life. 
His mother was a remarkable woman : a great story-teller 
among other things. The place of his birth was near the 
Gap of Barnesmore, a line of hills which is rarely, if ever, 
without shadow — not unlike Butt's own life. It was one of 
his theories that people born amid mountain scenery are 
more imaginative than the children of the plains. His own 
nature was certainly imaginative in the highest degree, with 
the breadth and height of imaginative men, and also with 
the doubtings, despondency, and the dread of the Unseen. 

For many years he stood firmly by the principles of 
Orange Toryism, and he had the career which then belonged 
to every young Irish Protestant of ability. He went to 
Trinity College, which at the time presented large prizes, and 
presented them to those only who had the good luck to 
belong to the favoured faith. Butt's advancement was rapid. 
He was not many years a student when he was raised to a 
Professorship of Political Economy. When he went to the 
Bar his success came with the same ease and rapidity. He 
was but thirty-one years of age, and had been only six years 
at the Bar, when he was made a Queen's Counsel. In politics, 
however, he had made his chief distinction. It will be re- 
membered that when O'Connell sought to obtain a declaration 
in favour of Repeal of the Union from the newly emancipated 
Corporation of Dublin, Butt was selected by his co-religionists, 
young as he was, to meet the Great Liberator, and his speech 
was as good a one as could be made on the side of the main- 
tenance of the Union ; and many a year after, when he had 



230 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

become the leader of a Home Rule party, was quoted against 
him by Sir Michael Hicks- Beach, the Irish Chief Secretary 
of the period. 

In the State trials of 1848 Butt was one of the chief 
figures, and in every important trial, for several years, he was 
engaged. Of great though irregular industry, deeply devoted 
to study, with a mind of large grasp and a singularly retentive 
memory, he was intimately acquainted with all the secrets of 
his profession ; and throughout his life was acknowledged to 
be a fine lawyer. He represented in Parliament both Youghal 
in his native county, and Harwich in England. As an 
English member he belonged to the Protectionist party, and 
was among the ablest spokesmen of the creed in its last and 
forlorn struggles. His entrance into Parliament aggravated 
many of his weaknesses. It separated him from his pro- 
fession in Dublin, and thereby increased his already great 
pecuniary liabilities. His character in many respects was sin- 
gularly feeble. Some of his weaknesses leaned to virtue's side, 
and many of the stories told of him suggest a resemblance 
to the character of Alexandre Dumas pere. He borrowed 
largely and lent largely, and often in the midst of his sorest 
straits lavished on others the money which he required him- 
self, and which often did not belong to him. Throughout 
his life he was, as a consequence, pursued by the bloodhound 
qf vast and insurmountable debt. At least once he was for 
several months in a debtors' prison, and there used to be 
terrible stories — even in the days when he was an English 
member of Parliament — of unpaid cabmen and appearances 
at the police courts. 

Butt was a man of supreme political genius : one of those 
whose right to intellectual eminence is never questioned, but 
willingly conceded without effort on his side, without opposi- 
tion on the part of others. But the irregularities of his life 
shut him out from official employment, and he saw a long 
series of inferiors reach to position and wealth while he 
remained poor and neglected. There is a considerable period 
of his life which is almost total eclipse. There came an 
Indian summer when he returned to the practice of his pro- 
fession in Ireland, and once more joined in the fortunate 
struggles of his countrymen. 



ISAAC BUTT 231 

The reader has already been told of the prominent part 
he had played in the defence of the Fenian prisoners, in the 
Amnesty movement afterwards started for their release, in the 
Land agitation that preceded the Land Act of 1870, and 
finally in the inauguration of the Home Rule movement. In 
this way he had once more become a prominent and an im- 
mensely popular political figure. Then he had been sent to Par- 
liament, and already in several of the constituencies the new- 
movement had supplied the candidate and the cry. Mr. Glad- 
stone's dissolution of 1 874 came upon Butt with the same bewil- 
dering surprise as upon so many other people. That election 
found him in a cruel difficulty. On the one hand, the country 
was beyond all question with him ; he knew that he could count 
on the masses to vote in favour of self-government as securely 
as every other popular leader who has ever been able to make 
the appeal. The majority of the constituencies were ready, he 
knew, to return Home Rule candidates ; and thus the general 
election afforded him the opportunity of creating a greater 
Home Rule party. But, on the other hand, elections cannot be 
fought without money ; elections were dearer then even than 
they are now, and Butt wanted to fight, not a seat here and 
there, but a whole national campaign ; for three-fourths of 
the constituencies could be won by a Home Rule candidate if 
a Home Rule candidate could be brought forward. For so 
immense a work he had nothing to fall back on but a few 
hundreds of pounds in the funds of the Home Rule Associa- 
tion, and he himself was at one of his recurrent periods of 
desperate need. I have heard on pretty good authority that 
he was arrested for debt on the very morning of the day 
when, learning of the dissolution, he was making his plan of 
campaign, and that, though the matter was arranged in some 
way or other, it prevented him from exercising that personal 
supervision over the general election which is absolutely 
required from the leader of a movement. 

Butt could only adopt, under the circumstances, a policy of 
compromise, and make the best out of bad but inevitable 
material. Where there was a real and genuine Home Rule 
candidate ready to come forward, and able to bear the ex- 
penses of an election contest, Butt fought the 'seat. In this 
way he was able to bring into public life many earnest men 



232 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

who had for years found it impossible to take any parlia- 
mentary part in rescuing the country. His party contained 
A. M. Sullivan, Mr. Biggar, Mr. Richard Power, Mr. Sheil, 
and several others, who were really devoted to the National 
cause. On the other hand, he had to accept, in constituencies 
where he had not the men or the money to fight, the ' death- 
bed repentance,' as it was called, of men who had grown grey 
in the service of one or other of the English parties. These 
time-worn Whigs or Tories — such as Sir Patrick O'Brien and 
Sir George Bowyer — of course swallowed the Home Rule 
pledge. Some of the new men were little better. The race 
of Rabagas had been scotched but not killed, and among 
Butt's recruits was a certain proportion of lawyers, who were 
as ready as any of their predecessors to sell themselves and 
their principles to the highest bidder. Many of them have 
since received office ; all of the tribe have expected and 
asked it. It was, then, a very mixed party Butt had gathered 
around him — a party of patriots and of place-hunters, of 
men young, earnest, and fresh for struggle, and of men 
physically exhausted and morally dead, a party of life-long 
Nationalists and of veteran lacqueys. There was a tragic 
contrast between such a party and the renewed and sublime 
and noble hopes of the nation. This fact must always in 
fairness be recollected when the policy of Butt is criticised. 
That policy was in every respect perfectly wrong and full of 
the most serious dangers to Ireland, but it was a policy that 
was largely forced upon him by the weakness and worthles::ness 
of the elements around him. The party, however, such as it 
was, pronounced, in no faamistakable terms, the verdict of 
the Irish people on the legislative tenure between England 
and Ireland. Of the 103 Irish members, sixty were returned 
pledged to vote for the entire rearrangement of the legislative 
relations between the two countries. 

Such was the Parliament ; and now how was it with the 
leader ? His weakness with regard to pecuniary matters has 
been already touched upon ; he had, besides, all the other 
foibles, as well as the charms, of an easy-going, good-natured, 
pliant temperament. Though his faults were grossly exagger- 
ated — for instance, many intimates declare that they never 
saw him, even during the acquaintance of years, once under 



ISAAC BUTT 233 

the influence of drink — he had, unquestionably, made many 
sacrifices on the altars of the gods of indulgence. It may be 
that with him, as with so many others, the pursuit of 
pleasure was but the misnomer for the flight from despair. 
He was all his life troubled by an unusually slow circulation, 
and it may be that the central note of his character was 
melancholy. In his early days he was a constant contributor 
to the ( Dublin University Magazine,' and his tales have a vein 
of the morbid melancholy that runs through the youthful 
letters of Alfred de Musset. Allusion has been already made to 
his imaginativeness : this imaginativeness did much to weaken 
his resolve. Curious stories are told of the superstitions that 
ran through his nature. Though a Protestant, he used to carry 
some of the religious symbols — medals, for instance — which 
Catholics wear, and he would not go into a law court without 
his medals. There are still more ludicrous stories of his 
standing appalled or delighted before such accidents as put- 
ting on his clothes the wrong way, and other trivialities. 
Then, the demon of debt, which had haunted him all his life, 
now stood menacing behind him. He had just re-established 
himself in a considerable practice when he again entered 
Parliament, and membership of Parliament is entirely in- 
compatible with the retention of his entire practice by an 
Irish barrister. He was throughout his leadership divided 
between a dread dilemma : either he had to neglect Parlia- 
ment, and then his party was endangered ; or neglect his 
practice, and then bring ruin on himself and a family en- 
tirely unprovided for, deeply loving and deeply loved. There 
is no Nemesis so relentless as that which dogs pecuniary 
recklessness ; the spendthrift is also the drudge ; and in his 
days of old age, weakness, and terrible political responsi- 
bilities, Butt had to fly between London and Dublin, to 
stop up o' nights, alternately reading briefs and drafting Acts 
of Parliament : to make his worn and somewhat unwieldy 
frame do the double work, which would try the nerves and 
strength of a giant with the limber joints and freshness of 
early youth. And at this period Butt's frame was worn, 
though to outward appearances he was still vigorous. The 
hand of incurable disease already held him tight, and the 
dark death, of which he had so great a horror, was not many 



234 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

years off; finally, in 1874, he was sixty-one years of age. 
On the other hand, he had great qualities of leadership. He 
was unquestionably a head and shoulders above all his fol- 
lowers, able though so many of them were, and was, next to 
Mr. Gladstone, the greatest Parliamentarian of his day. Then 
he had the large toleration and the easy temper that make 
leadership a light burden to followers ; and the burden of 
leadership must be light when — as in an Irish Party — the 
leader has no offices or salaries to bestow. And, above all, 
he had the modesty and the simplicity of real greatness. 
Every man had his ear, every man his kindly word and smile, 
and some his strong affection. Thus it was that Butt was to 
many the most lovable of men ; and more than one political 
opponent, impelled by principle to regard him as the most 
serious danger to the Irish cause, struck him hard, but v/ept 
as he dealt the blow. 

This sketch of the character of Butt will show the points 
in which he was unsuitable for the work before him. Pie 
was the leader of a small party in an assembly to which it 
was hateful in opinion, and feeling, and temperament. A 
party in such circumstances can only make its way by au- 
dacious aggressiveness, dogged resistance, relentless purpose ; 
and for such parliamentary forlorn hopes the least suited of 
leaders was a man whom a single groan of impatience could 
hurt and one word of compliment delight. 

The plan adopted by Butt with his new party was to 
formulate the proposals of the party in a number of Bills to 
be brought before the House ; and it ought to be said, in jus- 
tice to his memory, that he was the most unsparing of him- 
self among all the members of his party in carrying out this 
policy. With his own hand he drafted the numerous Bills in 
which these proposals were embodied, leaving to some one of his 
followers the honour of proposing them to the House. There 
was one question above all others in which he took an in- 
terest, and which he always kept in his own hand. This was 
the Land question. Butt's record on the Land question is, 
indeed, one of the most honourable chapters in his whole 
career. Harassed as he was by debt and by the demands of 
a large professional practice, he found time to write a whole 
series of pamphlets in defence of the claims of the tenants ; 



ISAAC BUTT 



235 



and almost immediately after the passage of the Land Act 
of 1870 he wrote a large volume on the Act which is dis- 
tinguished by legal learning, lucidity of style, and extra- 
ordinary subtlety of reasoning. He was, too, one of the first 
to discover the worthlessness of Mr. Gladstone's first Land 
Act ; and he never ceased, throughout his career as leader, 
to agitate for its amendment. 

The history of Butt's attempts to obtain land or any other 
reform in Ireland from the Imperial Parliament was the same 
as that of so many of his predecessors. Year after year, 
session after session, there was the same tale of Irish demands 
mocked at, denounced with equal vigour by the leaders of 
both the English parties alike, and then rejected in the 
division lobbies by overwhelming English majorities. 

The following is a list of the Land Bills proposed by 
Parliament between 1871 and 1880. 1 



Date 


Bill 


Introduced by 


Fate 


1871 


Landed Property, Ireland, Act, 1847 








Amendment Bill . . . 


Serjeant Sherlock 


Withdrawn 


1872 


Ulster Tenant Right Bill 


. Mr. Butt . 


Dropped 


1873 


Ulster Tenant Right Bill 


Mr. Butt 


Dropped 


1873 


Landlord and Tenant Act, 1870 


, I 






Amendment Bill . 


Mr. Butt 


Dropped 


1873 


Landlord and Tenant Act, 1870 


I 






Amendment Bill, No. 2 


Mr. Heron . 


Dropped 


1874 


Landlord and Tenant Act, 1870 








Amendment Bill . 


Mr. Butt 


Dropped 


1874 


Landlord and Tenant Act, 1870 








Amendment Bill, No. 2 


Sir J. Gray . 


Dropped 


1S74 


Ulster Tenant Right Bill 


Mr. Butt . 


Dropped 


1874 


Irish Land Act Extension Bill 


The O'Donoghue 


Dropped 


1875 


Landed Proprietors', Ireland, Bill 


Mr. Smyth 


Dropped 


1875 


Landlord and Tenant, Ireland, Act 








1870, Amendment Bill . 


Mr. Crawford 


Rejected 


1876 


Landlord and Tenant, Ireland, Act 








1870, Amendment Bill . 


Mr. Crawford 


Withdrawn 


1876 


Tenant Right on Expiration 


f 






Leases Bill .... 


Mr. Mulholland . 


Dropped 


1876 


Land Tenure, Ireland, Bill 


Mr. Butt . 


Rejected 


1877 


Land Tenure, Ireland, Bill 


Mr. Butt . 


Rejected 


1877 


Landlord and Tenant, Ireland, Act 








1870, Amendment Bill . 


Mr. Crawford 


Withdrawn 


1878 


Landlord and Tenant, Ireland, Act 








1870, Amendment Bill . 


Mr. Herbert 


Dropped 


1878 


Tenant Right Bill . 


Lord A. Hill 


Rejected by Lords 


1878 


Tenant Right, Ulster, Bill 


Mr. Macartney . 


Withdrawn 


1878 


Tenants' Improvements, Ireland, Bi 


1 Mr. Martin . 


Rejected 


1878 


Tenants' Protection, Ireland, Bill 


Mr. Moore . 


Dropped 


1879 


Ulster Tenant Right Bill 


Mr. Macartney . 


Rejected 


1879 


Ulster Tenant Right Bill, No. 2 


Lord A. Hill 


A\ ithdrawn 


1879 


Landlord and Tenant, Ireland, Bil 


Mr. Herbert 


Dropped 


1879 


Landlord and Tenant, Ireland, Act 








1870, Amendment Bill . 


Mr. Taylor , 


Dropped 


1879 


Landlord and Tenant, Ireland, Act 






c 



1870, Amendment Bill, No. 2 


Mr. Downing 


Rejected 


■a 1 1880 


Landlord and Tenant, Ireland, Act 






£ 1 1880 


1870, Amendment Bill . . 


Mr. Taylor . 


Dropped 


Ulster Tenant Right Bill 


Mr. Macartney . 


Dropped 



1 Healy, p. 67. 



236 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The English journals at the same time gave equally abun- 
dant testimony of the invincible ignorance of English opinion 
upon Irish questions. While in every part of Ireland the 
tenants were being crushed under a yearly increasing load of 
rack-rent into a deeper abyss of hopeless poverty, and the 
whole country was drifting once again to the periodic, 
famine, an influential London journal was gaily declaring that 
Mr. Butt's whole case rested on an agreeable romance. Of the 
squalid lives of Irish farmers in their miserable patches of 
over-rented land ; of the crushing of hearts and the break-up 
of homes through eviction and emigration ; of the swift and 
inevitable advance of the spectre of Famine — of all the cruel 
and intolerable suffering and wrong that provoked the cyclone 
of the Land League, the ' Daily Telegraph ' could write this 
airily and pleasantly : — 

A large allowance must be made for the vivid fancy of Irishmen. 
But for that reflection the sad story which Mr. Butt told the House 
of Commons last night about the effects of the Irish Land Act (of 
1870) would be disheartening indeed. . . . Mr. Butt warns us that 
the old ' land war ' is breaking out again ; not through any fault of 
the farmers, he is careful to explain, but through the infatuation of 
those landlords who have used their wits to make the Act a dead 
letter. Were all this true, we should not wonder at Mr. Butt's de- 
mand for a Royal Commission to see how the Act works. But then, 
we repeat, allowance must be made for the vivid imagination of Irish- 
men. ... It might have been contended that Mr. Butt had made a 
fair case for a small inquiry, if he had not betrayed at every turn of 
his speech his real aim, which is, not to amend the Land Act, but to 
secure the Irish farmers fixity of tenure at a rent arranged on some 
general ground. . . . Mr. Butt could scarcely have expected the 
Government to treat such a project seriously, and he must have been 
prepared for its decisive rejection by the House. 1 

It cannot be a surprise to anybody, after this long series 
of gross and contemptuous rejection of the demands for which 
all Ireland pleaded by the British Parliament, that Irish 
hearts were carried away by the men of their race who com- 
pelled that deaf, blind, insolently ignorant assembly to hear 
and see and understand Irish demands. In fact, it was the 

1 Quoted in New Ireland, pp. 398-9. 



ISAAC BUTT 237 

action of the Ministry from 1874 to 1877, and of previous 
Ministries, that begat the power of Mr. Parnell and the great 
movement of which he is now the leader. 

Butt, meantime, was very much pained and disappointed 
by this universal rejection of all his proposals, and began to 
have gloomy forebodings as to the success of his policy. He 
knew that he and his party held power in Ireland by a very 
insecure tenure. That hatred of Parliamentarians and that 
distrust in the efficacy of parliamentary action, which, as 
I have had over and over again to recall as one of the most 
potent forces of Irish politics, throughout the whole period of 
Irish history, from the treason of Keogh up to the present 
hour — that hatred of Parliamentarians, I say, and that distrust 
in the efficiency of parliamentary action, was by no means 
killed, even by the success of Butt in sweeping the constitu- 
encies at the general election. It might be that he had se- 
duced the majority of the people back to faith in constitutional 
effort, but the minority of men who still stood by physical 
force as the only efficient, and honourable, and practicable 
method of winning Irish rights, were determined, violent, and 
watchful. It seems a long time ago now, but it is not more 
than eight years, since a large number of Irishmen thought 
sincerely that Isaac Butt was one of the greatest enemies the 
Irish cause had ever met with, because of the prestige which 
he succeeded in giving to the constitutionalism which Judge 
Keogh and the successive tide of Rabagas were supposed 
to have discredited for ever. Butt himself was unpleasantly 
reminded of the survival of this sentiment on more than one 
occasion. At a moment when, throughout nearly every part 
of Ireland, his appearance was the signal for a demonstration 
of popular trust that O'Connell might have envied, a meet- 
ing of his supporters, in the very city of Limerick, which he 
represented, was attacked by infuriated men armed with 
bludgeons. 

Butt could not help seeing that the disastrous fiasco of 
all his parliamentary proposals armed these watchful and 
violent enemies with a terrible argument against him and his 
methods. He knew, too, that the Irish people were not a 
people to whom a gospel of patience could be preached with 



238 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

any hope of a favourable hearing. The condition of the people, 
apart altogether from their temperament, did not permit them 
to be patient. Intimately acquainted as Butt was with the 
working of the Land Act of 1870, he probably knew very well 
that a crisis was inevitable, such as came upon Ireland in 1879. 
And possibly, in one of those moments of gloom and depres- 
sion with which he was too familiar, he may have anticipated 
an hour when there would come the same tragic and terrible 
close to his agitation which had wound up the career of 
O'Connell — a country not freed and prosperous, but once more 
tight in the grip of hunger, and more helpless than ever against 
oppression. To preach patience to a people under such con- 
ditions was to mock a starving man with honeyed words. 

There was, however, another and a graver danger to the 
success of Butt's movement. It has already been remarked 
that Butt had been forced to admit into his party many of the 
relics and the wrecks of an evil time — office-seekers, lawyers, 
life-long Whigs and Tories. Butt knew very well that, as 
time went on, he was bound to lose a certain proportion of 
such a party. When there is on the one side a certain 
nnmber of men willing to sell themselves and on the other a 
Government with vast resources and occasional need for 
the services of corrupt Irishmen, the moment when the two 
will come to a bargain is a matter of mutual arrange- 
ment. The Home Rule party had not been many years in 
existence when two or three of its members had accepted place, 
and there was not the least doubt that several others were 
willing. It was fortunate for Butt that a Conservative ad- 
ministration was in power ; the imagination stands almost 
appalled before the prospect of the number of his independent 
followers who would have accepted places if there were a 
Liberal Ministry to offer them. Nor is the imagination left 
wholly without assistance on this point. Since the break-up 
of the Butt party, a number of his most prominent followers 
have accepted office, and the few that still retain places in 
the House of Commons have, with scarcely an exception, 
gone over to the Liberal party, and are notoriously as open 
to employment as the cabbies in Palace Yard. Then, apart 
from the want of pence, which was driving several of Butt's 



ISAAC BUTT 239 

followers into office-seeking, the party was suffering from 
that hope deferred which depresses and then disintegrates 
political bodies. Session passed after session, motion after 
motion, Bill after Bill, and still no advance was made. 
Everybody has only to look at the condition of an Opposition 
in a minority in the House of Commons to see how disastrous 
are the effects of a continued period of fruitless hostility. All 
political students are acquainted with the passage in the 
works of Disraeli in which a picture is drawn of the difficult, 
hopeless, and weary position of the leader of an Opposition, 
and the attentive observers of the last Parliament will know 
that even the unparalleled gifts and lofty position and great 
services of Mr. Gladstone did not always save him from the 
buzz of conversation which marks the loss of hold over a 
deliberative assembly. But an English opposition, after all, is 
bound to be transformed in time into a Ministerial party ; 
ambitious men may have to wait, but at least they have a 
future ; while, in an Irish opposition, the path of honour and 
honesty leads to social disrepute, often to professional loss ; 
and has visions, not of portfolios, wealth and position, but the 
poverty, the neglect, and the gloom in which the careers of 
so many great Irishmen have closed. It is therefore, in an 
Irish party more than in any other, that the stimulus of success 
should come to the aid of honest purpose ; and here was the 
party of Butt years in existence, without a single triumph or 
one solitary benefit to show. Then the party, drawn from ele- 
ments so heterogeneous as Colonel King Harman and Mr. 
Gray, Sir Patrick O'Brien and Mr. Richard Power, could not be 
held in any strict bonds of discipline. Butt was exceedingly 
anxious to get the party to act together as a party on the 
great questions which divided the two English parties. The 
necessity of such a course of action it is unnecessary to argue 
at this time of day. It is the influence they exercise over 
the fortunes of English parties that gives to an Irish party 
the power they wield over the action of English ministries 
and parliaments ; and that influence can be exercised mainly 
in the great party divisions between the Whigs and Conserva- 
tives. An Irish party acting together on a purely Irish de- 
mand, and on that alone, need never cross the counsels 



240 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

nor disturb the peace of an English minister, for to Irish 
demands both the English parties give united opposition, 
until they can no longer be resisted. In the Parliament of 1 874, 
for instance, it gave Sir Stafford Northcote very little concern 
if Colonel King Harman voted in favour of Home Rule, after 
the annual and academic discussion, when the Irish were put 
down by a combination of all the English parties in the House ; 
for in all English party divisions he was secure of Colonel 
Harman's vote, as though he had not corrupted the general 
purity of his Conservatism' by the heresy of Home Rule. And, 
similarly, even Lord Hartington might excuse the occasional 
error of an expectant Whig like Mr. Meldon, when Mr. 
Meldon's vote against the Tories was as certain as his desire 
for a place. 

Butt fully grasped this truth of parliamentary tactics, but, 
of course, was unable to get men to act as an Irish party who 
were bound by corrupt hopes or party predilections to give their 
first allegiance to an English party and an English leader. 
Thus his whole policy was founded on sand. All these various 
causes, working together, had produced in the Irish party 
of 1874 disorganisation, depression, the breakdown of the 
barriers of shame among the corrupt, the sealing up of the 
fountains of hope among the pure. The period of dry rot 
had set in. 

In the light of subsequent events, it is now easy to see 
the dread abyss to which the Home Rule party was once 
more bringing Ireland. The accession of a Liberal ministry 
would have immediately completed the disaster which the 
defeat of Butt's proposals had begun. At least half the party 
would at once have become applicants for office, and probably 
a considerable number would have realised their wishes. The 
remainder, coalescing with the Liberal party, would gradually 
have sunk deeper and deeper into a position of obedience to 
the Liberal whips, and Irish national interests would once more 
have been made absolutely subservient to the interests of a 
single English party, to the convenience of Ministers, and to 
the opportunities of an overworked, listless, and generally 
hostile House of Commons. The first result of this state of 
things would have been to break down once more all faith in 



ISAAC BUTT 241 

parliamentary agitation. A portion of the people would have 
found some hope for the redress of intolerable grievances in 
another resort to revolutionary methods. The majority, 
following the precedent of the period immediately subsequent 
to Keogh's betrayal, would, in the cynicism begotten of blighted 
hope, once more have chosen bad or good men, honest patriots 
or self-seeking knaves, in the spirit of chance and of caprice. 
This downfall of constitutional agitation would have been 
made the more disastrous by events which at this moment 
were hurrying upon Ireland. The year 1879, as will presently 
be seen, brought one of those crises which were bound to 
recur in Ireland as long as its land system remained unre- 
formed. Famine would have followed the distress of 1879 
as it followed the blight of 1 846. The country, without an 
honest and energetic parliamentary representation, would have 
been left at the mercy of the ignorance, the flippant levity of 
English ministers, and Ireland, once more on the threshold 
of a successful movement, would have been dragged back for 
another generation into the slough of hunger, eviction, dis- 
honest representatives, and futile insurrection. It is probable 
that the country would have arisen from this catastrophe as 
she has arisen from so many others in her struggle of cen- 
turies, for Irish struggle is impelled by an imperishable and 
ultimately resistless force — the force of a great and a just 
idea. But the recovery of nations, like that of individuals, 
must become more difficult with each relapse. Owing to the 
relentless influence of unjust laws the character of the Irish 
population was daily changing. Emigration had torn from 
the country a vast proportion of the young and stalwart, 
and the population that remained behind was not merely 
diminished by half of its actual numbers, but by the loss of 
more than half of its manhood, energy, and spirit. It is, 
therefore, possible that the breakdown of the Home Rule 
party and the famine of 1879 might have led to an interval 
of political death even longer than the dreary interval between 
Keogh's treason and the Fenian insurrection. Possibly the 
two things might have achieved a conquest of all the national 
forces of Ireland by England so complete as to have ap- 
parently sounded the death-knell of Irish efforts for justice 



242 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

and for liberation. The capacity of the Irishman must be 
small and the imagination narrow who cannot see in his 
mind's eye the reality of the gigantic dangers that were then 
gathering over the fortunes of his country ; and still poorer 
must be the spirit of the Irishman who does not daily offer a 
prayer of overflowing gratitude for the two men by whom 
these calamities were averted, and a movement that was 
advancing rapidly to national destruction was transformed 
into the most hopeful and beneficent movement of modern 
Ireland. 

The men and the methods that warded off this catas- 
trophe were chosen with the ironical capriciousness of destiny. 
The one was a man already advanced in years, without the 
smallest trace of oratoricjd ability, without culture, with no 
political experience wider than that to be acquired on a 
water board or a town council. The other, at this time at 
least, was a young and obscure country gentleman, who had 
given no pledges to the political future save those of a very 
unsuccessful election contest, and two or three stumbling and 
very ineffective attempts at public speech. 

On the night of April 22, 1875, the House of Commons, 
was engaged in the not unaccustomed task of passing a 
Coercion Bill for Ireland. Mr. Butt, for some reason or 
other, thought it desirable that the progress of the measure 
on this evening should be slow, and he asked a member of 
his party, who was still young to the House, to speak against 
time. ' How long,' asked the member of his leader, ' would 
you wish me to speak ? ' 'A pretty good while,' was Mr. 
Butt's reply. Mr. Biggar, who was the member appealed to,, 
gave an interpretation to this mot d'ordre far larger than 
probably Mr. Butt had ever imagined or intended. It was 
five o'clock when Mr. Biggar rose, it was five minutes to nine 
when he sat down. He had managed to bridge over this 
interval by the reading of Acts of Parliament and of Blue 
Books, and in a House that for most of the time was as deso- 
late and gloomy as is the Agricultural Hall during the 
nocturnal portions of a six days' walking contest. He was. 
interrupted once by a friendly count, on another occasion 
by an observation of the Speaker. His voice, owing to the 



ISAAC BUTT 243 

long strain, and in spite of the glass of water with which he 
had armed himself, had begun to give way after this trial. 
Let us quote Hansard for a description of th5 scene ; its un- 
conscious humour and significance will be interesting : 

The hon. member proceeded to read extracts from the evidence 
before the Westmeath Committee — as' was understood — but in a 
manner which rendered him totally unintelligible. At length— — 

The Speaker, interrupting, reminded the hon. gentleman that the 
rules required that an hon. member, when speaking, should address 
himself to the chair. This rule the hon. gentleman was at present 
neglecting. 

Mr. Biggar said that his non-observance of the rule was partly 
because he found it difficult to make his voice heard after speaking 
for so long a time, and partly because his position in the House made 
it very inconvenient for him to read his extracts directly towards the 
Chair ; he would, however, with permission take a more favourable 
position. 

The hon. member accordingly, who had been speaking from below 
the gangway, removed to a bench nearer to the Speaker's chair, taking 
with him a large mass of papers, from which he continued to read 
long extracts, with comments. 

At length the hon. member said he was unwilling to detain the 
House at further length, and would conclude by stating his conviction 
that he had proved to every impartial mind that the Government had 
made out no case for the maintenance of this monstrous system of 
coercion, and that their proposal was perfectly unreasonable. The 
hon. gentleman, who had been speaking nearly four hours, then 
moved his amendment. 1 

Neither Mr. Butt, nor the House of Commons, nor Mr. 
Biggar himself could possibly have foreseen the momentous 
place which this night's work was destined to hold in all 
the subsequent history of the relations between England and 
Ireland. It was on this night that the policy was born which 
has since become known to all the world — the policy known 
as ' obstruction ' by its enemies and as the ' active policy ' by 
its friends. It will be appropriate here to give a sketch of 
the man to whom this portentous political offspring owes its 
being. 

There are few men of whom the estimate of friends and 
1 Hansard, vol. ccxxiii. p. 145S. 



244 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

enemies is so diverse. The feeling of his friends- and inti- 
mates is affectionate almost to fanaticism. When there are 
private and convivial meetings of the Irish party, the effort is 
always made to limit the toasts to the irreducible minimum, 
for talking has naturally ceased to be much of an amusement 
to men who have to do so much of it in the performance of 
public duties. There is one toast, however, which is never 
set down and is always proposed : this toast is the ' Health 
of Mr. Biggar.' Then there occurs a scene which is pleasant 
to look upon. There arises from all the party one long, 
spontaneous, universal cheer, a cheer straight from every 
man's heart ; the usually frigid speech of Mr. Parnell grows 
warm and even tender ; everything shows that, whoever 
stands highest in the respect, Mr. Biggar holds first place in 
the affections of his comrades. There is another and not un- 
interesting phenomenon of these occasions. To the outside 
world there is no man presents a sterner, a more prosaic, and 
harder front than Mr. Biggar. On such occasions the other 
side of his character stands revealed. His breast heaves, his 
face flushes, he dashes his hand with nervous haste to his 
eyes ; but the tears have already risen and are rushing down 
his face. 

To his intimates, then, Mr. Biggar is known as a man 
overflowing with kindness ; of an almost absolute unselfish- 
ness. A man once bitterly hated Mr. Biggar until he had a 
conversation with one of Mr. Biggar's sisters, and found that 
she was unable to speak of all her brother's kindness with 
an unbroken voice. It is amusing to watch his proceed- 
ings in the House of Commons. With all his fifty-seven 
years he is at the beck and call of men who could be 
almost his grandchildren. Mr. Healy is preparing an on- 
slaught on the Treasury Bench : ' Joe,' he cries to Mr. 
Biggar, 'get me Return so-and-so.' Mr. Biggar is off to 
the library. He has scarcely got back when the relentless 
member for Monaghan requires to add to his armoury the 
division list in which the perfidious Minister has recorded 
his infamy, and away goes Mr. Biggar to the library again. 
Then Mr. Sexton, busily engaged in the study of an official 
report, approaches the member for Cavan with a card and 



ISAAC BUTT 24s 

an insinuating smile, and Mr. Biggar sets forth on an ex- 
pedition to see some of the importunate visitants by whom 
Members of Parliament are dogged. As a quarter to six is 
approaching on a Wednesday evening, and Mr. Parnell thinks 
it just as well that the work of Government should not go on 
too fast, he calls on Mr. Biggar, and Mr. Biggar is on his 
legs, filling in the horrid interval — Heaven knows how ! The 
desolate stranger, who knows no Member of Parliament, and 
yearns to see the House of Commons at work, thinks fondly 
of Mr. Biggar, and obtains a ticket of admission. He is seen 
almost every night surrounded by successive bevies of ladies 
— young and old, native and foreign — whom he is escorting 
to the Ladies' Gallery. Nobody asks any favour of Mr. Biggar 
without getting it. The man who to the outside public 
appears the most odious type of Irish fractiousness is adored 
by the policemen, worshipped by the attendants of the 
Plouse ; and there is good ground for the suspicion that there 
was a secret treaty of inviolable friendship between him and 
the late Serjeant-at-Arms, the genial and universally popular 
Captain Gossett, founded on their common desire to bring 
sittings to the abrupt and inglorious end of a ' count out.' 

But this, as T have indicated, is but one side of his cha- 
racter. His hate is as fierce and unquestioning as his love, 
and he hates all his political opponents. He has the true 
Ulster nature : uncompromising, downright, self-controlled, 
narrow. The subtleties by which men of wider minds, more 
complex natures, less stable purpose and conviction, are apt 
to palliate their changes are entirely incomprehensible to 
Mr. Biggar, and the self-justifications of moral weakness arouse 
only his scorn. This side of his character will be best illus- 
trated by the statement that he has a strong dislike and 
distrust of Mr. Gladstone, and that he loathes Mr. O'Connor 
Power. His purpose, too, when once resolved upon, is in- 
flexible. Towards the close of the session of 1885 a tram- 
way scheme in the south of Ireland came before the House of 
Commons after it had passed triumphantly through the House 
of Lords. In his political economy Mr. Biggar belongs to 
the strictest sect of the laissez-faire school, and to every 
tramway scheme under Government patronage he has been 



246 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

accordingly strongly hostile, believing that they should be left 
to development by private enterprise. A deputation of strong 
"Nationalists came over from the district, they made out a 
capital case, convinced all the other members of the party 
present that the tramway was necessary, and a resolution 
was passed in their favour. But Mr. Biggar remained quite 
unmoved, persisted in his hostility, got over another and 
a rival deputation, and finally killed the Bill. It is this in- 
flexibility of purpose that has made him so great a political 
force. Finally, he is as fearless as he is single-minded. The 
worst tempest in the House of Commons, the sternest decree 
that English law could enforce against an Irish patriot, and 
equally the disapproval of his own people, are incapable of 
causing him a moment of trepidation. He has said many 
terrible things in the House of Commons : the instance has got 
to occur of his having retracted one syllable of anything 
he has ever said. There is a scene in ' Pere Goriot ' in which 
the pangs of the dying and deserted father are depicted 
with terrible force. He is speaking of his daughters and 
of their husbands : of the one he speaks with the tender- 
ness of a woman's heart ; of the other, with the ferocity of 
an enraged tiger. The passage suggests the two so contrary 
sides of Mr. Biggar's nature : in the depth of his love, in the 
fierceness of his hate, he is the ' Pere Goriot ' of Irish politics. 
A great difficulty meets the biographer of Mr. Biggar at 
the outset. He is not uncommunicative about himself, but 
he does not understand himself, and he much underrates 
himself. Asked by a friend to write his autobiography, his 
answer was : ' I am a very commonplace character.' In his 
early days, when he used to be asked to make a speech, he 
cheerfully started out on the attempt, having made the pre- 
liminary statement, ' I can't speak a d d bit' 

To think (writes Mr. Healy, one of Mr. Biggar's most intimate 
friends and warmest admirers) that the muddy vesture of Belfast did 
grossly close him in for nearly fifty years without one gleam of the 
jewel it enshrined. 

By what strange channels did his stark Presbyterian soul drink in 
the fertilising dews of the traditions of Irish nationality ? In what 
northern furnace was it inflamed with that consuming hatred of Clan- 
London, which might glow in the passionate bosom of some down- 



ISAAC BUTT 



247 



trodden Catholic Celt? Was it as chairman of the Belfast Water 
Company he first attempted to lisp the bold anthem of Erin-go-Bragh? 
The Lord only knows ! 

Other men write their memoirs or have their biographies written 
for them. But, alas ! when nature planted in the breast of Mr. 
Biggar the spirit of obstruction, she neglected to provide him with 
any gift of introspection, so that the most skillful tapping doth but 
coldly furnish forth his inward yearnings and tendings. 

Still acting on information I have received, I timidly venture to 
set down the fact that one hears at times, in tracing his early develop- 
ment, of a certain grandmother. Thereat, of course, a smile arises ; 
but I desire to place her memory on reverent record, for she enter- 
tained the boyhood of the father of obstruction with stories of Antrim 
fight — where her brother, subsequently an exiled fugitive, was 
wounded — and of many another '98 chronicle of the Presbyterian 
rebels. It is a long cry, no doubt, from pikes to blue-books, but the 
Irish conflict is not a genteel duel with a courteous enemy, who 
proffers a choice of weapons ; so in place of the insurgent grand- 
uncle, who fled the country after the Antrim collapse, the Biggar 
family came in sequence to be represented in the warfare by the 
blocking boomerang of the member for Cavan. 1 

Joseph Gillis Biggar was born in Belfast on August 1, 
1828. He was educated at the Belfast Academy, where he 
remained from 1832 to 1844. The record of his school days 
is far from satisfactory. He was very indolent — at least he 
says so himself — he showed no great love of reading — in this 
regard the boy, indeed, was father to the man — he was poor 
at composition, and, of course, abjectly hopeless at elocution. 
The one talent he did exhibit was a talent for figures. It was, 
perhaps, this want of any particular success in learning, as well 
as delicacy of health, which made Mr. Biggar's parents con- 
clude that he had better be removed from school and placed 
at business. He was taken into his father's office, who — as is 
known — was engaged in the provision trade, and he continued 
as assistant until 1861, when he became head of the firm. 
This part of his career may be here dismissed with the remark 
that he retired from trade in 1880, and is now entirely out of 
business. 

Mr. Biggar always took an interest in politics, and it will 
not surprise those acquainted with his subsequent career to 
1 United Ireland, August 29. 1885. 



248 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

know that he was always on the side which was in a hopeless 
minority, and which opposed the reigning clique and the es- 
tablished regime. For instance, when the late Mr. McMechan 
sought on one occasion the representation of Belfast, he found 
no encouragement from perhaps any person of prominence in 
the town except Mr. Biggar ; and it was a curious forecast of 
many contests in which the member for Cavan was to play a 
part subsequently that the aspirant had only fourteen sup- 
porters in all, and that Mr. Biggar was one of the fourteen. 
In 1868 Mr. Biggar had a better opportunity of working 
against his enemies. For nearly half a century the represen- 
tation of Belfast was in the gift of a small Conservative caucus 5 
who ruled the general body of the electors as despotically as 
ever Boss dominated the voting battalions of an American 
city. There had begun, however, to grow up a feeling that 
the rigid rule of irresponsible oligarchy had been allowed to 
last long enough. The first attack came upon it from an 
unexpected quarter. So far as an outside critic can judge of 
the intricacies of Belfast politics, the Protestant artisans in 
that city seem to be divided between two sentiments. On 
the one hand, they are fiercely Protestant, and therefore may 
be made the instruments of those exhibitions of religious 
fanaticism which are among the strangest survivals of our 
time. On the other hand, they have a certain democratic 
spirit which demands a due share of respect for their feelings 
and their demands. Accordingly, there has been witnessed 
occasionally in Belfast the curious spectacle of the represen- 
tation being sought by two candidates, each as rigidly ortho- 
dox as the other, in the Conservative, or even in the Orange, 
creed ; and the- party has divided itself into bourgeois Con- 
servatives on the one side, and working-men Conservatives 
on the other. The first occasion on which this triangular 
struggle took place was in 1868. In the preceding year Mr. 
William Johnston, of Ballykilbeg, had been prosecuted by 
the then Conservative Government— the Orangemen had not 
the advantage at that period of having a ' gentle, but firm ' 
ally in a Liberal Lord-Lieutenant — for an offence against 
the Party Processions Act, and, being convicted, had been 
imprisoned. This had made him very popular with large 



ISAAC BUTT 249 

sections of the Orangemen, especially with those of the work- 
ing classes, and he was invited by them to contest Belfast. 
The Conservative caucus, however, did not approve of the 
candidature ; the hostility of the caucus was a recommen- 
dation of Mr. Johnston in other quarters, and the curious result 
followed that the ' No Popery ' champion was warmly sup- 
ported by the majority of the Catholic voters. Mr. (now Sir 
Thomas) M'Clure was run at the same time, and supported 
to a large extent by the same combination. Mr. Biggar was 
one of the main influences in producing this result, though, 
of course, he had as little faith in the Whiggery of Mr. 
M'Clure as he had sympathy with the fanatical bigotry of 
Mr. Johnston. 

The victory which M'Clure and Johnston gained over the 
Conservative caucus shook for a time their power, and, under 
the influence of this antagonism to the long-settled oligarchy, 
Mr. Biggar made his first attempt to get into the Town 
Council. He stood for his native ward, which had always 
been regarded as a Tory stronghold, and he was well beaten. 
This was in 1870. Mr. Biggar accepted his defeat in a spirit 
that was quite characteristic, and with a declaration, the full 
significance of which was probably not felt by the people to 
whom it was then made — for the real nature of Mr. Biggar 
had yet to be discovered : he said he would fight the ward 
on every occasion until he became its member. In the fol- 
lowing year he again stood, with the result that he was. 
returned at the head of the poll. He had previously to this 
obtained a seat on the Water Board, and he was chairman of 
that body from August 1869 to March 1872. Some stormy 
scenes occurred during Mr. Biggar's tenure of office ; for the 
future member for Cavan gave his colleagues some specimens 
of that absolutely irreverent freedom of speech which has 
since alternately shocked and amused a higher assembly. 
There was a meeting in county Antrim for the purpose of 
expressing sympathy with the Queen on the recovery of the 
Prince of Wales ; and, whether it was because of his disbelief 
in princes generally, or because he was disgusted with the 
fulsomeness of some of the language employed, Mr. Biggar 
wrote to the newspapers to say that the attendance at the 



250 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

meeting did not exceed fifty. The statement of Mr. Biggar 
was indisputably accurate, but a member of the Water Board 
insisted that such a letter betrayed disloyalty, and he pro- 
posed an address to the Queen from the Board as a counter- 
manifestation to the epistle of the chairman. Mr. Biggar 
defended himself with tenacity (as may be believed), criticised 
the address to her Majesty with relentless outspokenness, and 
so offended and scandalised his colleagues that when his 
year of office closed he was superseded, and was even refused 
the customary vote of thanks. 

Mr. Biggar's first attempt to enter Parliament was made at 
Londonderry in 1 872. He had not the least idea of being suc- 
cessful ; but he had at this time mentally formulated the policy 
which he has since carried out with inflexible purpose — he pre- 
ferred the triumph of an open enemy to that of a half-hearted 
friend. The candidates were Mr. Lewis, the present Conser- 
vative member, Mr. (now Chief Baron) Palles, and Mr. Biggar. 
At that moment Mr. Palles, as Attorney- General, was prose- 
cuting Dr. Duggan and other Catholic bishops for the part 
they had taken in the famous Gahvay election of Colonel 
Nolan — of which mention has been made in the sketch of 
Judge Keogh's career — and Mr. Biggar made it a first and 
indispensable condition of his withdrawing from the contest 
that these prosecutions should be dropped. Mr. Palles re- 
fused ; Mr. Biggar received only 89 votes, but the Whig 
was defeated, and he was satisfied. The bold fight he had 
made, marked out Mr. Biggar as the man to lead one of the 
assaults which at this time the rising Home Rule party was 
beginning to make on the seats of Whig and Tory. He 
himself was in favour of trying his hand on some place where 
the fighting would be really serious, and he had an idea of 
contesting Monaghan. When the general election of 1874, 
however, came, it was represented to Mr. Biggar that he 
would better serve the cause by standing for Cavan. He was 
nominated, and returned, and member for Cavan he has since 
remained. Finally, let the record of the purely personal part 
of Mr. Biggar's history conclude with mention of the fact that, 
in the January of 1 877, he was received into the Catholic Church. 
The change of creed for a time produced a slight estrange- 



ISAAC BUTT 251 

ment between himself and the other members of his family, 
who were staunch Ulster Presbyterians, and there were not 
wanting malicious intruders who sought to widen the breach. 
But this unpleasantness soon passed away, and Mr. Biggar is 
now on the very best of terms with his relatives. 

It was not long after the night of Mr. Biggar's four 
hours' speech that a young Irish member took his seat 
for the first time. This was Mr. Parnell, elected for the 
county of Meath in succession to John Martin. The veteran 
and incorruptible patriot had died a few days before the 
opening of this new chapter in Irish struggle. There was a 
strange fitness in his end. John Mitchel had been returned 
for the county of Tipperary in 1875. After twenty-six years 
of exile he had paid a brief visit to his native country in the 
previous year. He had triumphed at last over an unjust 
sentence, penal servitude, and the weary waiting of all these 
hapless years, and had been selected as its representative by 
the premier constituency of Ireland. But the victory came 
too late. When he reached Ireland to fight the election he 
was a dying man. A couple of weeks after his return to his 
native land he was seized with his last illness, and after a few 
days succumbed, in the home of his early youth and sur- 
rounded by some of his earliest friends. John Martin had 
been brought by Mitchel into the national faith when they 
were both young men. They had been sentenced to trans- 
portation about the same time ; they had married two sisters ; 
they had both remained inflexibly attached to the same 
national faith throughout the long years of disaster that fol- 
lowed the breakdown of their attempted revolution. Martin, 
though very ill, and in spite of the most earnest remon- 
strances of friends like Joseph Cowen and A. M. Sullivan, 
went over to be present at the deathbed of his life-long leader 
and friend. At the funeral he caught cold, sickened, and in 
a few days died. He was buried close to Mitchel's grave. 
To the two friends, as fitly as to any two human beings, the 
beautiful and familiar words of the sacred writer can be 
applied : ' Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their 
death they were not divided. 5 

It was to the glorious heritage of Martin's representation 



252 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of Meath that the young Wicklow squire had succeeded. 
Nobody at the time attached any particular importance to 
his success, except perhaps to indulge in a silent comparison 
between the long services and approved faith of the dead 
patriot and the inexperience and want of ability of the raw 
recruit who had become his successor. For the first impres- 
sions of Mr. Parnell were decidedly unfavourable. 

When the dissolution of February 1874 came, Mr. Parnell 
wished to stand for Wicklow ; but he was then high 
sheriff of the county, and the Government would not allow 
him to qualify himself by resigning. Shortly after, Colonel 
Taylor's acceptance of office as Chancellor of the Duchy in the 
new Disraeli Administration, made a vacancy for the County 
Dublin, and it was deemed advisable to fight the seat. The 
contest was regarded as a forlorn hope, and was known at 
the same time to be necessarily an expensive one. The offer 
of Mr. Parnell to fight the seat at his own expense came at a 
time when there was scarcely a penny in the exchequer of 
the National party, and the mere fact alone of his willingness 
to bear the burden in such a contest was enough to secure 
him a hearing ; but there were many doubts and fears, and 
the first impression was that, if a young landlord, hitherto 
entirely unknown in national struggle — for the outer and, 
still more, the inner history of this shy, reserved young man, 
buried in his Wicklow estate, was a closed book to everybody 
in the world — if such a man wished to represent a constituency, 
it was from no higher motive than social ambition ; and men 
who had become Members of Parliament for such reasons, have 
left a long record of half-hearted adherence, ending in violent 
hostility to the national cause. At last it was agreed that the 
young aspirant should at least get the privilege of a hearing, 
and he had a personal interview with the Council of the 
Home Rule League. John Martin and Mr. A. M. Sullivan 
were favourably impressed ; the latter undertook to propose 
his adoption at a meeting in the Rotunda, and here is his 
account of what followed and Mr. Parnell's debut in public 
life : ' The resolution which I had moved in his favour having 
been adopted with acclamation, he came forward to address 
the assemblage. To our dismay he broke down utterly. 



ISAAC BUTT 253 

He faltered, he paused, went on, got confused, and, pale with 
intense but subdued nervous anxiety, caused every one to 
feel deep sympathy for him. The audience saw it all, and 
cheered him kindly and heartily ; but many on the platform 
shook their heads, sagely prophesying that if ever he got to 
Westminster, no matter how long he stayed there, he would 
either be a " Silent Member," or be known as " Single-speech 
Parnell."' 1 

Nobody was surprised when, as the result of the election, 
Colonel Taylor was returned by an overwhelming majority. 
If anything were needed to account for the expected result, 
and to encourage hope for a better chance next time, it was 
found in the universal sentiment that the Nationalists had 
been represented by an extremely poor candidate. Then, as 
now, Mr. Parnell had none of the qualities which had hitherto 
been associated with the idea of a successful Irish leader. 
He has now become one of the most potent of parliamentary 
debaters in the House of Commons, through his power of 
saying exactly what he means and his thorough grasp of his 
own ideas and wants. 2 But Mr. Parnell has become this in 
spite of himself. He retains to this day an almost invincible 
repugnance to speaking ; if he can, through any excuse, be 
silent, he remains silent, and the want of all training before 
his entrance into political life made him a speaker more than 
usually stumbling. Then his manner was cold and reserved ; 
he seemed entirely devoid of enthusiasm, and he spoke with 
that strong English accent which in Ireland has come to 
be inevitably associated with the adherents of the English 
garrison and the enemies of the national cause. 

But, if the truth were known, Mr. Parnell, in entering upon 
political life, was reaching the natural sequel of his own 
descent, of his early training, of the strongest tendencies of 
his own nature. It is not easy to describe the mental life of 
a man who is neither expansive nor introspective. It is one 

1 New Ireland, p. 409. 

2 ' No man, as far as I can judge, is more successful than the hon. member 
in doing that which it is commonly supposed that all speakers do, but which in 
my opinion few really do — and I do not include myself among those few — namely, 
in saying what he means to say.' — Mr. Gladstone, Hansard, vol. cclxxvii. p. 482. 



254 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of the strongest and most curious peculiarities of Mr. Parnell, 
not merely that he rarely, if ever, speaks of himself, but that 
he rarely, if ever, gives any indication of having studied him- 
self. His mind, if one may use the jargon of the Germans, is 
purely objective. There are few men who, after a certain 
length of acquaintance, do not familiarise you with the state 
of their hearts or their stomachs or their finances ; with their 
fears, their hopes, their aims. But no man has ever been a 
confidant of Mr. Parnell. Any allusion to himself by another, 
either in the exuberance of friendship or the design of flattery, 
is passed by unheeded ; and it is a joke among his intimates 
that to Mr. Parnell the being Parnell does not exist. But from 
various casual and unintentioned hints the following may be 
taken as a fair summary of his life and its influences. 

The history of 'his own family was well calculated to make 
him a strong Nationalist. The family comes from Congleton, 
in Cheshire, and it is from this town that one branch, raised 
to the peerage, has taken its title. Thomas Parnell, the poet, 
was one of the family. The parliamentary distinction dates, 
in the Parnell family, from the early part of the last century. 
John Parnell was member for Maryborough, in the Irish 
House of Commons, one hundred and fifty years ago. He 
was son of a judge of the Queen's Bench. He died in 1782, 
and he was immediately succeeded by his son John, after- 
wards Sir John. In 1787 Sir John was made Chancellor of 
the Exchequer. In the ' Red List ' in which Sir Jonah Bar- 
rington sums up his impressions of the Irish politicians of 
his time, he writes opposite the name of Sir John Parnell the 
one word ' Incorruptible.' He proved his claim to the title 
by giving up the office he had held for seventeen years, and 
voting steadily against the Union. 

Henry Parnell, the son of Sir John, was a member of the 
Irish House of Commons at the same time, and, like his 
father, stood steadily by Grattan and the other advocates of 
Irish nationality to the last. Sir John was elected to the 
United Parliament, but died in the first year of his new posi- 
tion, and was immediately succeeded by Henry. Sir Henry 
Parnell was for many years a strong advocate of the rights of 
his fellow-countrymen, and was in favour of the abolition of 



ISAAC BUTT 



255 



the Corn Laws, short parliaments, extension of the franchise, 
vote by ballot, and, curiously enough, the abolition of flogging 
in the army and navy, at a period when such doctrines were 
associated with advanced Radicalism. He was Secretary for 
War in Lord Grey's Ministry for 1832, and Paymaster of the 
Forces in the administration of Lord Melbourne, and in 1841 
he was created first Baron Congleton. 

John Henry Parnell, of Avondale, was grandson of Sir 
John Parnell and nephew of the first Lord Congleton. 
Making a tour through America while still a yoking man, 
he met, at Washington, Miss Stewart. Miss Stewart was 
the daughter of Commodore Charles Stewart, who played 
an important part in the history of America. It was he 
who, in his ship the ' Constitution,' in the war between Eng- 
land and America in 1815, met, fought, beat and captured the 
two English vessels — the c Cyane ' and the ' Levant ' — with the 
loss of seventy-seven killed and wounded among the British, 
and only three killed and ten wounded in his own vessel. It 
is, perhaps, characteristic of the love for legality in his race 
that he did not enter upon this engagement until the British 
vessels first attacked, for he had received from a British vessel, 
three days before the engagement, a copy of the London 
' Times,' containing the heads of the Treaty of Ghent, as signed 
by the Ministers of the United States and Great Britain, and 
said to have been ratified by the Prince Regent ] After a 
series of striking adventures, Stewart reached home with his 
vessel. His victory excited extreme enthusiasm among the 
Americans, and every form of public honour was bestowed 
upon him. In Boston there was a triumphal procession ; in 
New York the City Council presented him with the freedom 
of the city and a gold snuff-box, and he and his officers were 
entertained at a dinner ; at Pennsylvania he was voted the 
thanks of the Commonwealth, and presented with a gold- 
hilted sword. Congress passed a vote of thanks to him and 
his officers, and struck a gold medal and presented it to him 
in honour of the event. 

Afterwards Commodore Stewart was sent to the Mediter- 
ranean, where there was something approaching a mutiny 
1 The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by Thomas Sherlock, p. 23. 



256 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

amongst the officers under a different commodore. He soon 
came to a definite issue with his subordinates. He ordered a 
court-martial on a marine to be held on board one of his 
vessels. The officers preferred to discuss the case at their 
leisure in a hotel in Naples, and there tried and convicted the 
marine. The Commodore promptly quashed the conviction, 
and, when the court passed a series of resolutions, put all the 
commanding officers of the squadron under arrest. The 
result was the complete restoration of order and the approval 
of Commodore Stewart's conduct by the President and the 
Cabinet. 

Admiral Stewart, as he became, lived to a great age, and 
in time had taken a place in the affections of his country- 
men somewhat similar to that of old Field-marshal Wrangel 
among the Germans of our day. He used to be known as 
' old Ironsides,' and the residence which he purchased in Bor- 
dentown was, in spite of himself, baptized ' Ironsides Park.' 
He was once prominently spoken of as a candidate for the 
Presidency, and, in less than four months, sixty-seven papers 
pronounced in his favour. 

But the project did not receive his sanction ; he gave it no coun- 
tenance ; he would not even discuss it ; he was ' unusually nervous 
and fidgety' during the agitation of the subject ; and at length its 
promoters were impelled to give it up. He regained his usual equa- 
nimity only when his name ceased to be bandied about by the political 
press. 1 

He was eighty-three years of age when Fort Sumter was 
fired upon. At once he wrote asking to be put into active 
service : ' I am as young as ever,' he declared, ' to fight for my 
country.' 2 But of course the offer had to be refused. He 
survived nine years, and suffered very severely towards the 
end of his life. 

We know how he suffered, and how gradually, yet surely, he was 
failing. And yet we heard how near the invalid came to blowing 
himself up in some strange- chemical experiment, and what fun he 
made of the danger. To the last he was cheerful and hopeful — 
busied with affairs, dictating letters, cracking jokes, expecting soon 
to be well again. Then he could not leave his bed — was unable to 

1 The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by Thomas Sherlock, pp. 27-8. 

2 lb. p. 2S. 



ISAAC BUTT 257 

speak without agony — wrote on a slate ' I want .' They could 

not read what it was he wanted, his hand trembled so. Perhaps 
it was the cup of cold water they pressed to his parched lips. 
Thus surrounded by those who loved him the brave spirit passed 
peacefully away. 1 

Finally, the following is a description of his appearance 
and character : — ■ 

Commodore Stewart was about five feet nine inches high, and of 
a dignified and engaging presence. His complexion was fair, his 
hair chestnut, eyes blue, large, penetrating, and intelligent. The 
cast of his countenance was Roman, bold, strong, and commanding, 
and his head finely formed. His control over his passions was truly 
surprising, and under the most irritating circumstance his oldest sea- 
man never saw a ray of anger flash from his eye. His kindness, 
benevolence, and humanity were proverbial, but his sense of justice 
and the requisitions of duty were as unbending as fate. In the 
moment of greatest stress and danger he was as cool and quick in 
judgment as he was utterly ignorant of fear. His mind was acute 
and powerful, grasping the greatest or smallest subjects with the 
intuitive mastery of genius. 2 

It is said that, in many respects, Mr. Parnell bears a strong 
resemblance to the characteristics of his grandfather whose 
name he bears. In physique he is much less English or Irish 
than American. The delicacy of his features, the pallor of 
complexion, the strong nervous and muscular system, con- 
cealed under an exterior of fragility, are characteristics of the 
American type of man. Mentally, also, his evenness of 
temper, and coolness of judgment, suggest an American 
temperament. 

Mr. Parnell was born in Avondale, county Wicklow, in 
June 1846. Curiously enough, nearly the whole of his early 
life was passed in England, and in entirely English surround- 
ings. When he was six years of age he was placed at school 
in Yeovil, Somersetshire. Next, he was under the charge of 
the Rev. Mr. Barton at Kirk- Langley, Derbyshire ; next, 
under Rev. Mr. Wishaw, in Oxfordshire ; and, finally, he 
went to Cambridge University — the alma mater of his father. 
He did not graduate, and probably did not pay any very 

1 The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, by Thomas Sherlock, p, 28 
'-' lb. p. 29. 



258 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

great attention to the study of the curriculum of the univer- 
sity. 

He is not a man of large literary reading, but he is a 
severe and constant student of scientific subjects, and is 
especially devoted to mechanics. It is said to be one of his 
amusements to isolate himself from the enthusiastic crowds 
that meet him everywhere in Ireland, and, in a room by him- 
self, to find delight in mathematical books. He is a constant 
reader of ' Engineering ' and other mechanical papers, and he 
takes the keenest interest in all machinery. 

The surroundings of the house in which he was born and 
still lives were well calculated to arouse in young Parnell the 
hereditary disposition to strong national opinions. Wicklow, 
on the whole, is the most beautiful and the most historic 
county in Ireland, and Avondale is in the centre of its greatest 
beauties and its most historic spots. 

Many of the lessons which these historic spots were cal- 
culated to teach were reinforced by the servants around the 
family mansion. I have made the remark that it is particu- 
larly difficult to follow the mental history of a man that is 
neither introspective nor expansive ; and it is not from the 
lips of Mr. Parnell himself that one could learn much of his 
internal history. But one day, sitting in his house at Avon- 
dale, he happened to mention the name of Hugh Goffney, a 
gate-keeper in Avondale, and retold a story which the gate- 
keeper used to tell him when he was a youth. Goffney was 
old enough to have seen some of the scenes of the Rebellion ; 
and one of his stories was of a man who was taken by the 
English troops in the neighbourhood. The sentence upon 
him was that he was to be flogged to death at the end of a 
cart. The interpretation of the sentence by Colonel Yeo — 
such was the name of the commander — was that the flogging 
was to be inflicted on the man's belly instead of on his back. 
Goffney saw the rebel flogged from the mill to the old sentry- 
box in Rathdrum — the town near which Avondale is situate — 
and heard the man call out in his agony, ' Colonel Yeo ! Colonel 
Yeo ! ' and appeal for respite from this torture ; and also 
heard Colonel Yeo reject the prayer with savage words ; and 
finally saw the man, as he fell at last, with his bowels pro- 



ISAAC BUTT 259 

truding. When Mr. Parnell told the story, in his usual tran- 
quil manner, the thought suggested itself to my mind that, at 
last, I had reached one of the great influences that made Mr. 
Parnell the man he is, and that in this poor gate-keeper was 
to be found the early instructor whose lessons on British rule 
and its meaning imbued the young and impressionable heir 
of the Parnell name and traditions with that love and admira- 
tion for British domination in Ireland which has characterised 
his public career. 

Such stories appeal to what is, beyond doubt, the strongest 
feeling, the most positive instinct of Mr. Parnell's nature — 
his hatred of injustice. He has the loathing of masculine 
natures for cruelty in all forms. This feeling, though never 
expressed in words, finds strong manifestation often in acts. 
One of his acts while still the unknown squire was to pro- 
secute a man for cruelty to a donkey. Recently, while a 
very important and vital resolution was under discussion at 
a meeting of the Irish party called to arrange the plan of 
the electoral campaign, the meeting was amused, and a 
little disconcerted, to see Mr. Parnell rise with naif uncon- 
sciousness, leave the chair, and disappear from the room. 
He was followed by a handsome dog, which had been pre- 
sented to him by his friend and colleague, Mr. Corbet ; 
and the meeting had to tranquilly suspend its discussions 
until the leader of the Irish people had seen after the dinner 
of a retriever. It was characteristic of the modesty and, at the 
same time, scornfulness of his nature, that all through the 
many attacks made upon him by Mr. Forster, and other 
gentlemen who wear their hearts upon their sleeves, he never 
once made allusion to his own strong love of animals ; but to 
his friends he often expressed his disgust for the outrages that, 
during a portion of the agitation, were occasionally committed 
upon them. He did not express these sentiments in public, 
for the good reason that he regarded the outcry raised by 
some of the Radicals as part of the gospel of cant for which 
that section of the Liberal party is especially distinguished. 
To hear a man like Mr. Forster refusing a word of sympathy, 
in one breath, for whole housefuls of human beings turned 
out by a felonious landlord to die by the roadside, and, in the 



2 6o THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

next, demanding the suppression of the liberties of a nation 
because half-a-dozen of cattle had their tails cut off ; to hear 
the same men, who howled in delight because the apostle of 
a great humane movement, like Mr. Davitt, had been sent to 
the horrors of penal servitude, shuddering the next moment 
audibly over the ill-usage of a horse, was quite enough to 
make even the most humane man regard the love of animals 
— at least, by Radicals— as but another item in the grand 
total of their hypocrisy. Mr. Parnell regards the lives of 
human beings as more sacred than even those of animals, 
and he is consistent in his hatred of oppression and cruelty 
wherever they may be found. His sympathies are with the 
fights of freemen everywhere, and he often spoke in the 
strongest terms of his disgust for the butcheries in the 
Soudan, which the Liberals, who wept over Irish horses, and 
foamed over the tails of Irish cows, received with such 
Olympian calm. 

In 1867, the ideas that had been sown in his mind in 
childhood first began to mature. His mother was then, as 
probably throughout her life, a strong Nationalist, and so 
was, at least, one of his sisters. There is a tradition among 
the survivors of the literary staff of the ' Irish People ' news- 
paper of a young lady, heavily veiled, coming with a contri- 
bution to the office of the journal during its troubled career. 
This was Miss Fanny Parnell. Many of the Fenian refugees 
found shelter and protection in the house of Mrs. Parnell, and 
were in this way enabled to escape from the pursuing blood- 
hounds of the law. It was at this epoch that the execution 
of Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien took place in Manchester ; and 
this, as has already been mentioned, was the turning-point in 
che mental history of Mr. Parnell, and set him irrevocably in 
favour of Nationalist principles. 

However, it was a considerable time before he even 
thought of entering political life. Like his father he spent 
some time in travel in America. While there he met with a 
railway accident in company with his brother John. ' The 
best nurse I ever had,' said Mr. John Parnell to me in 
America, ' was my brother Charlie.' And then he told me 
how, for weeks, his brother had remained night and day by 
his side. 



ISAAC BUTT 26 r 

In 1 87 1 Mr. Parnell returned to Avondale, and began the 
life of a country squire. His American blood showed itselx 
in a keener sense of the possibilities of his property and of 
his own duties than are usually associated with the Irish 
landlord. Then, though he cannot be described as a joyous 
man, he takes a keen interest in life and everything going on 
around him, and could not, under any circumstances, keep 
from being actively occupied in some pursuit. He hunted 
and he shot like those around him ; but, besides this, he set 
up saw-mill and brush factory, and sunk shafts in search of 
the mineral ore in which Wicklow was said to abound. He 
was a kind and generous landlord, and enjoyed the affection 
of all around him. 

It was probably the Kerry election of 1872 that first gave 
him the idea of entering upon a parliamentary career, for 
Mr. Blennerhassett, who had won so great a victory for the 
National party, was, like himself, a Protestant and a landlord. 
Finally, in 1873, the new National party held a conference in 
the Round Room of the Rotunda, where, a century before, 
Parnells had met in defence of the same great cause ; and 
their heir no longer hesitated. His subsequent history has 
been told ; and now the narrative returns to an account of 
his parliamentary career. 

Mr. Biggar and Mr. Parnell brooded for some time over 
the strange spectacle of the impotence that had fallen upon 
the Irish party. Both were men eager for practical results ; 
and debates, however ornate and eloquent, which resulted in 
no benefit, appeared to them the sheerest waste of time, and 
a mockery of their country's hopes and demands. Probably 
they drifted into the policy of ' obstruction,' so called, rather 
than pursued it in accordance with a definite plan originally 
thought out. There was in the Irish party at this time a 
man who had formulated the idea from close reflection on 
the methods of Parliament. This was Mr. Joseph Ronayne. 
Ronayne had been an enthusiastic Young Irelander, and 
though, amid the disillusions that followed the breakdown 
of 1848, he had probably bidden farewell for ever to armed 
insurrection as a method for redressing Irish grievances, he 
still held by an old and stern gospel of Irish nationality and 



262 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

thought that political ends were to be gained not by soft words, 
but by stern and relentless acts. He, if anybody, deserves 
the credit of having pointed out, first to Mr. Biggar and then 
to Mr. Parnell, the methods of action which have since proved 
so effective in the cause of Ireland. 

When one now looks back upon the task which these two 
men set themselves, it will appear one of the boldest, most 
difficult, and most hopeless that two individuals ever proposed 
to themselves to work out. 

They set out, two of them, to do battle against 650 ; they 
had before them enemies who, in the ferocity of a common 
hate and a common terror, forgot old quarrels and obliterated 
old party lines ; while among their own party there were 
false men who hated their honesty and many true men who 
doubted their sagacity. In this work of theirs they had to 
meet a perfect hurricane of hate and abuse ; they had to 
stand face to face with the practical omnipotence of the 
mightiest of modern empires ; they were accused of seeking 
to trample on the power of the English House of Commons, 
and six centuries of parliamentary government looked down 
upon them in menace and in reproach. In carrying their 
mighty enterprise, Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar had to under- 
go labours and sacrifices that only those acquainted with the 
inside life of Parliament can fully appreciate. Those who 
undertook to conquer the House of Commons had first to 
conquer much of the natural man in themselves. The House 
of Commons is the arena which gives the choicest food to the 
intellectual vanity of the British subject, and the House of 
Commons loves and respects only those who love and respect 
it. But the first principle of the active policy was that there 
should be absolute indifference to the opinion of the House 
of Commons, and so vanity had first to be crushed out. 
Then the active policy demanded incessant attendance in the 
House, and incessant attendance in the House amounts 
almost to a punishment. And the active policy required, in 
addition to incessant attendance, considerable preparation ; 
and so the idleness, which is the most potent of all human 
passions, had to be gripped and strangled with a merciless 
hand. And finally, there was to be no shrinking from speech 



ISAAC BUTT 26-3 

or act because it disobliged one man or offended another ; 
and therefore, kindliness of feeling was to be watched and 
guarded by remorseless purpose. The three years of fierce 
conflict, of labour by day and by night, and of iron resistance 
to menace, or entreaty, or blandishment, must have left many 
a deep mark in mind and in body. ' Parnell,' remarked one of 
his followers in the House of Commons one day, as the Irish 
leader entered with pallid and worn face, ' Parnell has done 
mighty things, but he had to go through fire and water to do 
them.' 

Mr. Biggar was heard of before Mr. Parnell had made 
himself known ; and to estimate the character of the member 
for Cavan — and it is a character worth study — one must read 
carefully, and by the light of the present day, the events of the 
period at which he first started on his enterprise. In the ses- 
sion of 1875 he was constantly heard of; on April 27 in that 
session he ' espied strangers ' ; and, in accordance with the 
then existing rules of the House of Commons, all the occu- 
pants of the different galleries, excepting those of the ladies 
gallery, had to retire. The Prince of Wales was among the 
distinguished visitors to the assembly oh this particular even- 
ing, a fact which added considerable effect to the proceeding 
of the member for Cavan. At once a storm burst upon him, 
beneath which even a very strong man might have bent. Mr. 
Disraeli, the Prime Minister, got up, amid cheers from all 
parts of the House, to denounce this outrage upon its dignity; 
and to mark the complete union of the two parties against 
the daring offender, Lord Hartington rose immediately 
afterwards. Nor were these the only quarters from which 
attack came. Members of his own party joined in the 
general assault upon the audacious violator of the tone of the 
House. Mr. Maurice Brooks, a so-called Nationalist member 
for Dublin, who has since, of course, joined the ranks of the 
nominal Home Rulers, and the late Sir George Bowyer, 
assisted in the denunciation. Mr. Biggar was, above all other 
things, held to be wanting in the instincts of a gentleman. 
' 1 think,' said the late Mr. George Bryan, another member of 
Mr. Butt's party, 'that a man should be a gentleman first 
and a patriot afterwards,' a statement which was, of course, 



264 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

received with wild cheers. Finally, the case was summed up 
by Mr. Chaplin. 'The hon. member for Cavan,' said he, 
' appears to forget that he is now admitted to the society of 
gentlemen.' 1 This w.as one of the many allusions, fashion- 
able at the time — among genteel journalists especially — to 
Mr. Biggar's occupation. It was his heinous offence to have 
made his money in the wholesale pork trade. Trade, as is 
known to every well-instructed Englishman, has its couches 
sociales in this happy country. Its caste is regulated, not only 
by the distinction between wholesale and retail, but by the par- 
ticular article in which the trader is interested. It was not, 
therefore, surprising that an assembly which tolerated the 
more aristocratic cotton should turn up its indignant nose at 
the dealer in the humbler pork. But much as the House of 
Commons was shocked at the nature of Mr. Biggar's pursuits, 
the horror of the journalist was still more extreme and out- 
spoken. 

Heaven knows (said a writer in the ' World ') that I do not scorn a 
man because his path in life has led him amongst provisions. But 
though I may unaffectedly honour a provision dealer who is a Member 
of Parliament, it is with quite another feeling that I behold a Member 
of Parliament who is a provision dealer. Mr. Biggar brings the 
manner of his store into this illustrious assembly, and his manner, 
even for a Belfast store, is very bad. When he rises to address the 
house, which he did at least ten times to-night, a whiff of salt pork 
seems to float upon the gale, and the air is heavy with the odour of 
the kippered herring. One unacquainted with the actual condition 
of affairs might be forgiven if he thought there had been a large failure 
in the bacon trade, and that the House of Commons was a meeting 

1 Mr, Biggar's action on this occasion had a secret history, which may here 
be told. It was the desire of the Liberals to bring the relations of the press with 
Parliament into a more satisfactory position. Especially it was felt to be a griev- 
ance that the press could be excluded by a single member. Mr. Disraeli favoured 
leaving things as they were : and it was thought that he should be brought to his 
senses by such patent proof of his mistake as the ordering out of the reporters by 
the words, ' I espy strangers.' Mr. Biggar's intrepidity suggested him as a proper 
person to take so audacious a step. A few nights afterwards, when Lord Hart- 
ington was demanding a reform, and Mr. Disraeli was advocating the old state ot 
things, Mr. A. M. Sullivan cleared the House ; and the whole Liberal party 
cheered him to the echo. Mr. Biggar was deserted and denounced by the Liberals, 
though he acted on their suggestion, because he happened to interfere with the 
convenience of Royalty. 



ISAAC BUTT 265 

of creditors and the right hon. gentlemen sitting on the Treasury 
Bench were members of the defaulting firm, who, having confessed 
their inability to pay ninepence in the pound, were suitable and safe 
subjects for the abuse of an ungenerous creditor. 1 

These things are mentioned by way of illustrating the 
marks and symptoms of the time through which Mr. Biggar 
had to live, rather than because of any influence they had 
upon him. On this self-reliant, firm, and masculine nature 
a world of enemies could make no impress. He did not 
even take the trouble to read most of the attacks upon him. 
Those that were made in the House of Commons in his own 
hearing neither touched him nor angered him. The only ran- 
cour he ever feels against individuals is for the evil they attempt 
to do to the cause of his country. This little man, calmly 
and placidly accepting every humiliation and insult that 
hundreds of foes could heap upon him, in the relentless and 
untiring pursuit of a great purpose, may by-and-by appear, 
even to Englishmen, to merit all the affectionate respect with 
which he is regarded by men of his own country and principles. 

The Irish people have long since decided between Mr. 
Biggar and the members of his own party with whom he was 
at war. If anyone desire to see how far that party is re- 
moved from the party of to-day, he has but to read the de- 
scriptions of some of the encounters between the member for 
Cavan and many of them upon the Coercion struggles of 
those days. Thus, on one occasion, Mr. McCarthy Downing, 
a so-called Nationalist, went out of his way to compliment 
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach on the courtesy with which he 
treated the Irish members when carrying through the House 
a Bill destructive of the liberties of their country. This was 
the speech which drew from Mr. Ronayne the grim remark 
that such compliments to the Minister in charge of a Coercion 
Bill reminded him of the shake-hands of the murderer with 
his executioner. On another occasion, when Dr. O'Leary pro- 
posed an adjournment of a stage of a debate on a Coercion 
Bill to another day, his own colleagues rose in revolt against 
the unreasonable proposal ; and Dr. O'Leary, scared and 
overwhelmed, had to consult the convenience of the Govern- 

1 March 5, 1875. 



266 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

ment and accelerate the destruction of his country's liberties, 
and withdrew his motion for adjournment. More interesting 
than these collisions with small and now forgotten men was 
Mr. Biggar's conflict with the leader of his party. The con- 
test between these two men is one of the most picturesque in 
parliamentary history. Rarely has a struggle appeared more 
unequal. The House of Commons never had an opportunity 
of seeing Butt at his best, but with an audience before him 
sympathetic with his views, he was a speaker of a persua- 
siveness as great as that of Mr. Gladstone himself. There was 
not a resource of the orator, a trick of the lawyer, a device of 
the parliamentary tactician's art unknown to him. He was, 
indeed, marked out as a leader of men in parliamentary 
struggles. 

Mr. Biggar, on the other hand, had not one of the gifts 
that make a great parliamentarian. He spoke haltingly, and 
with difficulty ; his sparse education was not improved by 
reading ; he was absolutely new to parliamentary and, practi- 
cally, to political life. But the moral chasm between Biggar 
and Butt was as wide as the intellectual chasm between 
Butt and Biggar. The relentless self-control of Biggar, the 
subordination of all his wants to his means, 1 his inflexible 
courage, and his unshakable persistence, made him a dan- 
gerous competitor for a man of the loose habits, of the easy 
self-indulgent nature, of the weak will and capricious purpose 
of Butt. Biggar was ultimately conqueror in this struggle. 
Sheer strength of character broke down sheer intellectual 
superiority. I put these two men in contrast and hostility, 
rather than Mr. Butt and Mr. Parnell, because the intellectual 
difference between the former and the present Irish leaders of 
the Irish party is by no means so great. Indeed, in many 
respects, Mr. Parnell is the equal of Mr. Butt as a parliamen- 
tarian and a parliamentary speaker. Then it was Mr. Biggar, 
and not Mr. Parnell, who began the struggle. 

The new policy, which had been inaugurated by Mr. 
Biggar in the session of 1875, was developed rather than 

1 Mr. Biggar lost heavily in his business for a couple of years while he was a" 
Member of Parliament.. He so rigidly economised that, instead of dining in the 
House, he trotted off to a cheap restaurant outside. 



ISAAC BUTT 267 

formulated. It began simply in the practice of blocking a 
number of Bills in order to bring them under the half-past 
twelve rule, which forbids opposed measures to be taken after 
that hour. It also became the custom of either the member 
for Cavan or the member for Meath to propose motions of 
adjournment in various forms when half-past twelve was 
reached, on the ground that proper discussion could not take 
place at so late an hour. Then, interstices of time which the 
Government would gladly employ for advancing some stage 
of their measures, were filled in by the Irish members. Thus, 
for instance, a Bill standing for second reading would be 
approaching that stage at twenty minutes past at an ordinary 
sitting, or half-past five on a Wednesday. To the horror and 
disgust of everybody else, Mr. Biggar or Mr. Parnell would 
rise and occupy the time between that hour and half-past 
twelve or a quarter to six, when contentious business could 
be no longer discussed, and further consideration of the 
measure had to be postponed to another day. In this manner 
the two members gradually felt their way, became more 
practised in speaking, and obtained an intimate acquaintance 
with the rules of the House. Throughout all this time, of 
course, they were harassed by interruptions, shouts of 'Divide,' 
groans, and calls to order ; and for a time, at least, Mr. 
Parnell used occasionally to lay himself open to effective in- 
terruption by his yet immature acquaintance with the laws of 
the assembly. ' How,' said a young follower of his to the 
Irish leader, ' are you to learn the rules of the House? ' ' By 
breaking them,' was Mr. Parnell's reply ; and this was the 
method by which he himself gained his information. 

It was not till the session of 1877 that Mr. Parnell and 
Mr. Biggar became engaged in the passionate and exciting 
scenes which made their names known all over the world, and 
brought the House of Commons definitely face to face with 
the new and portentous force which had unmasked itself within 
the parliamentary citadel. By this time Parnell and Biggar 
had resolved to take an active part in the discussion of 
English measures. It was fortunate for them that in this 
session there were introduced several Bills which enabled them 
to carry out this purpose. The Government brought forward 



268 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the Prisons Bill ; then there was the Mutiny Bill ; and finally, 
the ill-starred proposal for the absorption of the Transvaal in 
the South African Federation. By this time the position of 
Mr. Parnell had undergone a distinct change. The first im- 
pression of him and Mr. Biggar was simply that two unusually 
persistent bores had been added to the House of Commons, 
and that their constant speeches were the results, not of any 
definite policy, but of a feverish egotism. * The House of 
Commons has been familiar, since the beginning of its exist- 
ence, with this type of member ; and the unbroken tradition 
up to this period was that in time the bore had been con- 
quered and crushed out of existence. The assembly, by 
refusing to listen, by the loud buzz of conversation, by shouts 
of ' Divide,' or by the simpler method of deserting the House 
and leaving it a ghastly wilderness, had hitherto been able to 
wear out the most confirmed egotist and the most prolix 
talker. Anyone who has been a member of the House of 
Commons will know how tremendous is this reserve power. 
There had been 'obstructives,' of course, before the time of 
Parnell and Biggar. During the great Ministry of Mr. Glad- 
stone, between 1868 and 1874, obstruction had been developed 
to a fine art by several of the gentlemen who at this moment 
held official positions under Lord Beaconsfield. Everybody 
remembers how the Church Bill and the Land Bill, the Ballot 
Bill, and the Bill for the abolition of purchase in the army, 
had been dogged at every step of their progress by endless 
and silly amendments, by speeches against time, and by 
countless motions for adjournment. But the obstruction in 
these cases had been directed against particular Bills, whereas 
the obstruction that now faced Parliament intervened in every 
single detail of its business, and not merely in contentious 
business, but business that up to this time had been considered 
formal. The Irish duumvirate, in fact, found nothing too 
small and nothing too big for discussion, was as active in 
the small hours of the morning as at the hour when the 
sitting was still in the full vigour of youth ; in short, it threw 
the entire parliamentary machinery out of gear. The two 
leaders of this policy proved perfectly insensible to the 
methods that had been so omnipotent against their pre- 



ISAAC BUTT 269 

decessors. Praise did not soothe them nor violence make 
them falter ; if the House groaned, they paused until the 
groans were over ; if the House was turbulent, they trudged 
doggedly and merrily along until the House was worsted in 
the struggle. They talked in the emptiness of the dinner- 
hour at as great length, and with as much apparent self- 
satisfaction, as in the glare of the crowd and the eager atten- 
tiveness of the question time. The reality of this hideous 
danger had been doubted as long, as possible, but the session 
of 1 877 brought it into such notice that it could no longer 
be lightly regarded. 

It was part of the skilful tactics of Parnell and Biggar 
that their intervention in the debates of the House had 
always more or less of a rational appearance. They did 
not indulge in any wild declamation, nor make speeches full 
of empty- and purposeless talk. Their plan was to propose 
amendments to the different measures before the House ; and 
their amendments were rarely, if ever, open to the charge ot 
irrelevancy or frivolity. Another result of this mode of action 
was that the proposals of the two ' obstructives ' frequently 
found a certain amount of support from one or other section 
of the English members. On the Prisons Bill, for instance, 
Biggar and Parnell were sincerely anxious to make that dis- 
tinction between the treatment of political and ordinary 
prisoners which obtained in every civilised country in the 
world but England ; and in the House of Commons there 
was a strong party, not confined to any political section, in 
favour of more humane principles in the treatment of pri- 
soners of all kinds. On March 26, 1877, there was a lengthy 
discussion on some new clauses for better treatment of pri- 
soners, the main originator of which was Mr. H. B. Sheridan. 
By this time the House had begun to resent fiercely the 
frequent intervention of Mr. Parnell on the Bill ; and in sup- 
porting these clauses he was frequently called to order by 
the chairman and persistently interrupted by the English 
members. At last, at a little after one o'clock, Mr. Biggar 
proposed to report progress. The Liberal members, who had 
acted with the ' obstructives ' up to this time, now deserted ; 
and, when the division was called, there were in favour of the 



2 7 o THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

adjournment but ten, while 138 voted against it. Motions 
for adjournment followed each other in rapid succession, and, 
at three o'clock in the morning, the Government gave way. 
Mr. Butt had watched these proceedings with no friendly eye. 
To him they appeared childish and indecorous, and he was 
unable or unwilling to see the purpose that lay underneath. 
His superstitious regard for the dignity of the House, and the 
dread in his pliant nature of giving offence, had been skilfully 
worked upon by the Government. There was no doubt 
about his genuineness as a Home Ruler, but he had been a 
Conservative for many years, and a friend and associate of 
the party in power, and he was certainly considerably under 
the influence of its leaders. Curiously enough, one of the 
men who was supposed to have the most influence over him 
was the then Chief Secretary, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, 
though there had never been a Chief Secretary who met all 
demands for Irish reform with rejection more uncompromis- 
ing and more insolent. It is characteristic of the natures of 
the two men that it was the attitude of Hicks-Beach towards 
Mr. Butt which drove Mr. Biggar, as much as anything else, 
forward into the policy he had now adopted. After the Irish 
leader had succeeded, by threats and entreaties to his own 
followers, in helping the Chief Secretary to get forward with 
some of his business, he would, at a more advanced hour of 
the same evening, be refused the smallest concession by that 
same official ; and the robust nature of Mr. Biggar felt this 
insult to his leader more keenly than did the leader himself. 
Meantime, the Irish leader had been approached insidiously, 
and was meanly encouraged to steps that proved his political 
ruin. Mr. A. M. Sullivan states that : ' Early in April, ere 
yet things had gone very far, it occurred to some members 
of the Government to convey to the Irish leader a complaint 
of the conduct of his young men. This was coupled with 
dexterous praise of his own " noble regard " for " the dignity 
of Parliament." The old man was immensely flattered at the 
idea of being invoked as a power by the House of Commons.' ' 
It showed a strange want of any appreciation of the real 
facts of the case that the Irish leader should have thus inter- 

' New Ireland, p. 419. 



ISAAC BUTT 271 

preted the request addressed to him. The recognition of his 
power came only when it was employed in meeting the views 
of the Ministry and in yielding, to the temper of Parliament ; 
it had received no recognition so long as it was used in press- 
ing forward against the Ministry and against the House 
demands for the redress of the intolerable wrongs of his 
country. Where was his memory gone of the contemptuous 
rejection for the past three years of every one of the pro- 
posals that he made with the assent of the overwhelming 
majority of his countrymen ? A leader who, with such re- 
collections and such incontestable proof of the futility of soft 
methods, of appeals to the sense of justice in English Minis- 
tries and to the reason of Parliament, could think of the 
' dignity of Parliament,' and not the wrongs of Ireland, ' lacked 
gall to make oppression bitter.' Mr. Butt, however, threw in 
his lot with the enemies of his country, and attacked his two 
subordinates with fierce anger and reproach. 

This was a new and greater obstacle in the path of 
Parnell and Biggar. The party of Mr. Butt still had confidence 
in him. The majority of its weak and self-seeking members, 
besides, were only too glad to find him condemning practices 
which placed the party in collision with the temper of the 
House, and that greatly threatened to build up a power de- 
voted to the advance of Irish interests and divorced from the 
possibilities of English office. Parnell and Biggar thus found 
themselves confronted, not merely by the howls and groans, 
the vituperation and hostility of the two English parties, for 
once united against the common Irish enemy, but among 
their own countrymen and in their own party they stood 
practically alone — two men against sixty. Mr. O'Connor 
Power gave them some support, very strong in private but 
fitful and uncertain in public. They had received a more 
important recruit in Mr. O'Donnell, who had been elected for 
Dungarvan in June 1877, and who brought them the benefit 
of an acquaintance with a considerable number of subjects, 
great readiness in mastering information, and great fluency of 
speech. They also found support from the better elements 
of Mr. Butt's party — from Captain Nolan, Mr. Richard Power 
Major O'Gorman, Mr. E. D. Gray, Mr. Sheil, Mr. Kirke, and 
the late Mr. A. M. Sullivan. 



272 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Condemned by their own leader, and by the majority of 
their own party, Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar were naturally 
the more hated by the House of Commons, and their conduct 
the more bitterly resented ; and the resolve to put them down 
grew more vehement and more passionate. On the Mutiny 
Bill the struggle between the House and the two ' obstruc- 
tives ' occasionally burst into open conflict. Up to this time 
this Bill had passed through the House with scarcely a com- 
ment. Probably nine out of every ten members of the House 
scarcely knew the time or the circumstances under which the 
measure was passed ; and probably not one in a hundred, 
outside the War Office officials, could mention one of its 
provisions. The ' obstructives ' contested the Bill clause by 
clause, and, in some cases, line by line ; and as the measure 
consisted of an enormous number of clauses, its progress was 
exasperatingly slow. It was of further advantage to the 
' obstructives ' that the Bill was in charge of Lord Cranbrook 
(then Mr. Gathorne Hardy) — a man at once of vacuous mind 
and of fiery temper, unready in argument and easily roused 
to displays of passion ; and every display of temper was an 
advantage to the cool and self-possessed leader of the new 
policy. It was a curious fight, the struggle on the two sides 
going forward night after night. Mr. Hardy sat on the 
Treasury bench, reminding the spectator of the tea-kettle 
that stands all day long by the Irish hearth, ever bubbling, 
and occasionally boiling over. Beside him were, as a rule, 
one or two of his colleagues ; nearly every other part of the 
House was absolutely empty ; the only break in the solitude 
of the Opposition benches was that made by the figures of 
the two Irish members, with the addition, usually, of Mr. 
O'Donnell, and occasionally of Mr. O'Connor Power. For 
hours the Irishmen went on speaking several times on every 
amendment, using one set of arguments and then another ; 
answered sometimes patiently by the hapless War Minister, 
then left unanswered or attacked with vehemence. 

It was on the South African Bill that the long pent-up 
storm burst forth with tempestuous violence. Here again the 
Irish members had the advantage of fighting with English 
allies. Indeed, it may be said generally that Mr. Parnell and 



ISAAC BUTT 273 

Mr. Biggar would never have been able to carry on the cam- 
paign of 'obstruction' so called if it had not been for the 
active support and, oftener still, the quiet sympathy of mem- 
bers of the Liberal party. To the annexation of the Trans- 
vaal, as is known, Mr. Courtney offered untiring opposition ; 
Mr. Jenkins joined in ; and when they or any other of the 
Radical opponents of the measure grew wearied, or seemed 
inclined to give in, there was Parnell or Biggar, O'Donnell or 
O'Connor Power, or some other of the little Irish band, ready 
to revive the drooping battle. 

On July 25, 1877, a violent scene occurred. The House 
was in committee on the South African Bill. Mr. Jenkins 
had rendered himself obnoxious to some of the members 
of his own party by his opposition to the measure, and Mr. 
Monk accused him of abusing the forms of the House. Mr. 
Jenkins rose to order, vehemently denied the charge, and 
then moved that those words be taken down. Mr. Parnell at 
once rose. ' I second that motion,' he said ; ' I think the limits 
of forbearance have been passed. I say that I think the limits 
of forbearance have been passed in regard to the language 
which hon. members opposite have thought proper to address 
to me and to those who act with me.' At once Sir Stafford 
Northcote, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer and 
leader of the House, rose and moved that the latter words of 
Mr. Parnell be taken down. The motion of Mr. Jenkins was 
irregularly got rid of by the intervention of the chairman of 
committees — Mr. Raikes — who declared that the words of 
Mr. Monk were not a breach of order. The chairman, how- 
ever, proceeded to raise another subject of dispute by calling 
upon Mr. Parnell to withdraw his statement, ' accusing hon. 
members of this House of intimidation.' ' The hon. member 
must withdraw that expression,' said Mr. Raikes, amid the 
cheers and intense excitement of the House. Mr. Parnell 
rose to explain ; he was constantly interrupted by ' conversa- 
tion, coughs, exclamations, cries, and groans.' 1 He de- 
nounced the Bill as mischievous both to the colonists and to 
the native races, and instituted a comparison between Ireland 
and the South African colonies ; ' therefore,' he went on, ' as 

1 New Ireland, p. 424. 



274 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

an Irishman, coming from a country which had experienced 
to the fullest extent the results of English interference in its 
affairs, and the consequence of English cruelty and tyranny, 
he felt a special satisfaction in preventing and thwarting the 
intentions of the Government in respect to this Bill.' 

The moment these words had been uttered, the House 
thought that it had at last caught the cool, wary, and 
dexterous Irish member in a moment of forgetfulness and 
passion, and that he had given the long-sought opportunity 
for bringing him to account. Amid loud shouts, Sir Stafford 
Northcote rose and moved that the words of Mr Parnell be 
taken down ; and this having been done, he proposed that all 
further business should be stopped, and that the Speaker 
should be sent for. The Speaker was brought in, the House 
filled with an excited crowd, and Sir Stafford Northcote 
moved that Mr. Parnell ' be suspended till Friday next' Mr. 
Parnell was called upon to explain. Either from anger or cal- 
culation, he showed no anxiety to accept the chance of excul- 
pation. It was not till the Speaker had four times repeated 
the offer that Mr. Parnell got up. The speech he delivered 
is very characteristic of his temper and his methods. While 
the House was storming around him, and he was brought face 
to face with the prospect of undergoing parliamentary cen- 
sure after a manner unprecedented, and thus viewed with horror 
by all the men around him, he began by a technical objection. 
He pointed out that another motion had been proposed to 
the House before that of Sir Stafford Northcote's, and that, 
• therefore, the motion of the leader of the House was out of 
order. But the Speaker ruled this objection as untenable ; 
and Mr. Parnell had to proceed with his own defence. He 
addressed to the House, which was now in a state of almost 
frenzied excitement, a speech full of the boldest defiance 
and of stinging suggestion. The House was now beside 
itself with rage, and there were loud shouts that Mr. Parnell 
should withdraw, as is the custom when the conduct of a 
member is under consideration. Mr. Parnell left his seat and 
calmly proceeded to a place in the Speaker's gallery, and from 
this point of vantage looked down on the proceedings in which 
he himself was the subject of debate. 



ISAAC BUTT 275 

Sir Stafford Northcote now moved that ' Mr. Parnell 
having wilfully and persistently obstructed the public busi- 
ness, is guilty of contempt of the House, and that Mr. 
Parnell for his said offence be suspended from the service of 
the House till Friday next' In those days the House was 
not yet ready to take strong steps against individual members, 
and there was a recoil from the proposal of Sir Stafford 
Northcote. Then the Liberals remembered the bitter suffer- 
ing they had had to undergo from Tory obstructives in their 
days of power, and were not altogether indisposed to make 
some capital out of the distresses of the Tories— obstructives 
raised in the whirligig of time to such positions as Under- 
Secretary for the Colonies and Judge Advocate-General and 
Chairman of Committees. Mr. Knatchbull-Hugcssen, speak- 
ing from the front Opposition Bench, reminded Mr. Hardy of 
his famous avowal 'to thwart all the attempts of the late 
Ministry to carry out their army reforms.' Then a fatal flaw 
had been pointed out in the proposal of Sir Stafford North- 
cote. The words of Mr. Parnell had been examined with 
cooler temper after the first pounce upon him. It was dis- 
covered that the charge against him was^ after all, nothing but 
a mare's nest. He had certainly declared his interest in 
' thwarting and preventing the designs,' not of the House, 
which, of course, would be obstruction, but ' of the Govern- 
ment,' which is the object and the legitimate pursuit of every 
opponent of a Ministerial measure. It was seen that Sir 
Stafford Northcote had lost his head in his eagerness to throw 
a Christian to the lions, and he was obliged to postpone 
further debate upon the question until the following Friday. 

This was a triumph for Mr. Parnell. The Speaker, the 
occasion for which he had been called having passed away, 
went back to his room ; Mr. Raikes, the Chairman of Com- 
mittees, once more took his place ; Mr. Parnell, escorted by 
Mr. Biggar, re-entered the House, stood up again, and resumed 
his speech exactly at the point at which he had been inter- 
rupted two hours before by the impulsive motion of Sir 
Stafford Northcote. 

On the Friday following Sir Stafford Northcote proposed 
two new rules. The first was, that any member called to 



276 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

order twice by the Speaker or the Chairman of Committees 
could be suspended for the remainder of the sitting ; and the 
second, that no member be allowed to propose more than 
once in the same sitting a motion for reporting progress or 
the adjournment of the debate. The resolutions met with 
some criticism from the Liberal benches, but the Irish 
members offered no opposition, and the two rules were 
adopted for the session. The only time they were ever 
brought into requisition was against poor Mr. Whalley, who 
stumbled into a mistake, and who was suspended somewhat 
hurriedly and perhaps inconsiderately by the Speaker. On 
Wednesday, July 31, occurred the first of those prolonged 
sittings which have since become so familiar. The Govern- 
ment, owing to the dogged and persistent opposition of 
Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar, and to some extent of the 
Radicals below the gangway, were very far behind with their 
legislative proposals, and especially with the South African 
Bill. At last it was resolved that the measure should be 
pushed through- on the night of Tuesday, the 31st ; and on 
that night, for the first time, the expedient of relays that has 
since become so familiar was employed. The Irish members, 
aware of the arrangement that had been made against them, 
accepted the challenge, and determined to carry on the fight 
as long as their strength would hold out. There were but a 
few of them to carry on the contest, seven in all. Mr. Butt 
refused to have anything to do with the fight ; at a compara- 
tively early period of the struggle he had got up, denounced 
his followers in the strongest terms, and declared that, if con- 
duct like this received the support of the Irish people, he 
would retire from politics as from a ' vulgar brawl.' 

But Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar had got beyond the 
stage when they were to be deterred by such words from 
carrying out the policy which they believed to be necessary in 
the interests of their country ; and they fought on unheeding. 
They were supported for some time by Mr. Courtney, who 
was as hostile as they to the principle of the South African 
Bill, and who has since been justified, as well as Mr. Parnell 
and Mr. Biggar, by the disastrous termination to the measures 
of which the South African Bill was the starting-point. But 



ISAAC BUTT 277 

Mr. Courtney gave up the struggle in the small hours of the 
night. He saw that the Government had made up their 
minds to force the Bill through, characterised this proceeding 
as encountering ' rowdyism by rowdyism,' and left. The fight 
still went on. At a quarter-past eight in the morning, after 
he had been fifteen hours at work, Mr. Parnell retired to rest ; 
he came back at a quarter- past twelve, four hours later, and 
resumed his share in the debates. At two o'clock the last 
amendment on the South African Bill was disposed of, and 
the Bill was through. When the House rose it had been 
sitting for twenty-six hours. One other little incident is 
worth recording. Throughout the long watches of the night 
the Ladies' Gallery was occupied by one solitary and patient 
figure ; this was Miss Fanny Parnell, who shared and inspired 
the convictions of her brother, and who afterwards gave to 
the Irish cause some of its most stirring lyrics and its ablest 
argumentative defences, and an incessant labour amid daily 
increasing weakness and fast approaching death. 

This unprecedented sitting in the House of Commons 
produced in England a tempestuous burst of anger and excite- 
ment, and for some days Mr. Parnell, Mr. Biggar, and their 
associates were denounced with a wealth of invective that 
would not have been unequal to the merits of Guy Fawkes or 
Titus Oates. In their own party, too, the dissent from their 
tactics was reaching a climax ; Mr. Butt seemed resolved to 
throw down the final gage of battle, and call upon the party to 
make their choice between the continuance of his leadership 
and the suppression of the two mutineers. But all efforts to 
get the party to take decisive action proved abortive. It 
should be said for Mr. Butt that he had the courage of his 
convictions ; that being convinced, conscientiously convinced, 
that the obstructive policy was doing great injury to the 
national cause, he was read/ to denounce, and if possible, to 
end it. But the majority of his party, while hating the 
' obstructives ' more bitterly than Butt, because they interfered 
with their selfish purposes, were not the men to boldly take 
action against them. Time-servers and office-seekers, they 
wanted to survive till the advent of the blessed hour when the 
return of the Liberals to power would give them the long- 



278 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

desired chance of throwing off the temporary mask of 
national views, to assume the permanent livery of English 
officials. Before that period could arrive, they well knew that 
a General Election had to intervene, and who knew what 
control over that election might be exercised by such extre- 
mists as Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar ? The only political 
faith which these gentlemen really knew was, what has 
come to be wittily called by the Pall Mall Gazette ' the 
cult of the jumping cat' The 'jumping cat ' might jump to 
the side of Messrs. Parnell and Biggar, and thus it behoved 
prudent men not to be too extreme in their action against 
them. Thus all efforts failed to have them formally con- 
demned by the Home Rule party. 

This fact adds another element of tragedy to the woeful 
eclipse in which the last days of Butt ended. His opponents 
were honest and resolute ; his friends, self-seeking, treacherous 
and half-hearted, ready to turn without a blush or a pause 
from the worship of the setting to that of the rising sun. 

There was another portent of the time which still more 
disquieted Butt, and brought the peril of the situation more 
clearly and unmistakably before his eyes. The policy of 
Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar might not as yet have won the 
intelligence of Ireland, but it had beyond all question gained 
its heart. The session of 1877 had ended on August 13 ; on 
the 2 1st of the same month there was a meeting in the 
Rotunda in Dublin in honour of Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar ; 
the meeting was crowded ; the reception was enthusiastic ; 
the verdict of Dublin was given, and it was in favour of the 
new men and the new policy. 

The reader, to understand the success of the active policy, 
lias to recall the fact which I have endeavoured all through 
this narrative to imprint upon his mind as a central fact of 
Irish politics. This was that, since the betrayal of the national 
cause by Keogh and Sadleir in 1855, the heart of the Irish 
people had never been won for parliamentary agitation ; there 
was ever the tendency to the cynic doubtfulness of those who 
have once been greatly deceived. This had a bad effect in 
several ways. In the first place, it w ; as a steady obstacle to 
that infectious enthusiasm by the aid of which alone the 



ISAAC BUTT 279 

scattered interests and forces and tendencies of a nation can 
be moulded into the unity of a great united and national 
movement It left the constituencies to make the fight on 
local or capricious or non-essential issues instead of a common 
national platform ; above all things, it left the parliamentary 
party without that force of national passion behind them 
without which, in a struggle in an assembly alien, ignorant 
and generally hostile like the House of Commons, the words 
of Irish national representatives were but as sounding brass 
and tinkling cymbal. To give the people faith — that was the 
first necessity of a great movement in Ireland ; that was the 
object, and that is the chief justification, of the policy of the 
active party. 

Meantime the struggle was going on inside the bosom of 
the Home Rule party itself. On Monday and Tuesday, 
January 14 and 15, 1878, a conference was held in Dublin. 
There had been reports that the two parties would come into 
serious collision at this meeting. On both sides, too, tokens had 
been given which sufficiently indicated determination to come 
to close quarters and to have the issue fought out. A notice 
appeared, in the name of Mr. Butt, recapitulating resolutions 
which had been passed after the election of the party in 
1874 — resolutions pledging the party to act independently 
of both the English parties, and at the same time in unity 
with each other. Then Mr. Butt proposed to add the following 
resolution : — 

That in the opinion of this conference the cordial acquiescence 
in the resolutions is essential to that unity without which it is impos- 
sible to maintain an independent Irish party in the British House of 
Commons, and that while we deprecate any undue interference with 
the liberty of independent action, we are of opinion that no Irish 
member ought to persevere in any course of action which shall be 
declared by a resolution adopted at a meeting of the Home Rule 
members to be calculated to be injurious to the National cause. 1 

On the other hand Mr. O'Connor Power had given notice 
of this resolution : — 

That the hostility with which the just and constitutional demands 
for self-government made by a majority of the Irish representatives 
1 Nation, January 19, 1S7S. 



28o THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

has been met with by both English parties in the House of Commons 
increases the obligation which the Home Rule members are under 
of adhering to their engagement to hold themselves aloof from under- 
standings, combinations, or alliances with any English party not 
pledged to support a measure for the establishment of an Irish 
Parliament, and makes it essential to the success of the Irish cause 
that more determined and vigorous action should be taken by the 
parliamentary party. 1 

As the time for the conference approached, however, Butt 
again found that he was fighting without his army. A 
private meeting of the Irish members, held on the Saturday 
before the conference, arrived at a compromise. The rival 
resolutions were withdrawn, and a set of resolutions proposed 
by a Mr. P. McCabe Fay were accepted, which, if anything, were 
more favourable to Mr. Parnell than Mr. Butt. For these 
resolutions, while recommending c united and energetic action 
under the leadership of Mr. Butt,' also laid down, that on ques- 
tions on which the party had not arrived at a determination to 
adopt common action, ' the members of the party have full 
liberty of action ' 2 ; ' always remembering the deep obligation 
on all individual action, both in and outside the House of 
Commons, to endeavour to avoid any course that would 
injure the influence of unity of the Home Rule party.' 3 The 
resolutions also declared it desirable 'that more energetic 
action should be taken in Parliament,' and impressed upon 
the Home Rule members ' the necessity of increased activity 
and more regular attendance during the ensuing session.' At 
the conference, accordingly, everything proceeded with perfect 
harmony. Mr. Butt and Mr. Parnell both explained their 
policy in calm language, and with that unbroken courtesy to 
one another which always distinguished their relations even 
in the midst of their bitterest differences of opinion. A few 
sentences from the speeches of both upon the occasion will 
put the two policies in juxtaposition, and enable the reader 
to judge between the two. The following is an extract from 
Mr. Butt's speech : — 

I took the liberty some time ago at Limerick to lay down what 
I believed was the policy to pursue, and that was to make an assault 
' Nation, January 19, 1878. * lb. 8 lb. 



ISAAC BUTT 281 

along the whole line of English misgovernment, to bring forward 
every grievance of Ireland, to press the English House of Commons 
for their redress ; and I believed, and believe it still, that if once we 
get liberal-minded Englishmen fairly to consider how they would re- 
dress the grievance of Irish misgovernment, they would come in the 
end to the conclusion that they had but one way of giving us good 
government, and that was by allowing us to govern ourselves. 

And this is an extract from the speech of Mr. Parnell : — 

If I refrain from asking the country to-day, by the voice of this 
conference, to adopt any particular line of action or any particular 
policy, or to put any definite issue in reference to it before this 
conference, I do so solely because I am young and can wait 
(applause). 

Mr. Butt.— Hear, hear. 

And because I believe the country can also wait, and that the 
country which has waited so long can afford to be patient a little 
longer (cheers). . . . Mr. Butt has very fairly explained the policy 
that he has carried out during the three or four years that this Par- 
liament has lasted, and he has pointed to his speech at Limerick, in 
which he described his policy as one which was designed to make an 
attack on the whole line of English misgovernment in Ireland, by 
laying bare the grievances under which Ireland suffers, and he has 
told us his belief that if ... he made it clear to Englishmen that 
we really did suffer under many unjust laws, that he would be able 
to induce fair-minded Englishmen to direct their attention to the 
redress of these grievances, and that he would be able to persuade 
them that the best way to redress our grievances would be to leave 
us to redress them ourselves. 7 !Now I gladly agree with Mr. Butt 
that I think it is very possible and very probable that he would be 
•able to persuade fair-minded Englishmen in the direction that is in- 
dicated — (hear, hear) — but still, I do not think that the House of 
Commons is mainly composed of fair-minded Englishmen. If we 
had to deal with men who were capable of listening to fair arguments, 
there would be every hope of success for the policy of Mr. Butt as 
carried out in past sessions, but we are dealing with political parties 
who really consider the interests of their political organisations as 
paramount beyond every other consideration. (Hear ! hear !) 

The conference discussed at great length another question 
of even more importance. This was the period when the 
two English parties were in their fiercest antagonism to one 
another in reference to Lord Beaconsfield's policy on the 



282 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Eastern Question, and it was expected that there would be, 
during the approaching session of 1878, a great party fight in 
which the Irish vote, if united, could make itself a potent 
factor on one side or the other. After a long discussion it 
was agreed that the party should be recommended to agree 
to united action, and to vote solidly for one side or the 
other. 

So the conference ended in a drawn battle, but the session 
of 1878 was soon to show how impossible it was to do any- 
thing with the existing party, or with Mr. Butt himself. A 
more regular attendance on the part of members was re- 
quested, and the only result was that often when an impor- 
tant Irish Bill was proposed there were not half-a-dozen Irish 
members in their places. Joint action had been recommended 
on the Eastern Question, and when the great party division 
came the members took different sides. There was even a 
graver scandal, for Mr. Butt, the leader of the party, not only 
voted with the Ministry, and thereby swelled the majority of 
a party that had up to that time refused every single demand 
of the Irish people, but he spoke in a tone far more worthy of 
an Imperialist 'Jingo' than of an Irish Nationalist. 

This was an important victory for Mr. Parnell, and another 
success had immediately preceded. There are no Irishmen 
more fierce or resolute in the national faith than the Irishmen 
settled in England and Scotland. They are, though this is not 
generally thought, far more extreme in their views than the 
majority of the Irish in America, and they have an unbroken 
unity and a clear-sighted appreciation of the essential truth 
in grave national controversies that might well put to the 
blush the half-heartedness, the wavering purposes, and the 
divided counsels of the Irish who have remained in Ireland. 
The reasons of the political temper of the Irish in England 
are chiefly these : first, the true state of Ireland is only appre- 
ciated properly by contrast ; and the Irishman in England, 
when he goes back to his own country after a residence in a 
free and prosperous community like that in England, perceives 
more clearly and feels far more keenly the desperate state of 
his country than the Irishman who never has had the oppor- 
tunity of seeing anything but the poverty, servitude, and 



ISAAC BUTT 283 

squalor amid which he has always lived. Then the Irish in 
England — uncompromising in their attachment to their creed 
and their nationality, wearing the shamrock on St. Patrick's 
day, bearing the palm on Palm Sundays — are to a certain 
extent a caste apart, and have something of the narrowness, 
and provoke and resent something of the enmity which isola- 
tion produces. Thus it comes to pass that, of all the scattered 
branches of the Irish race, the Irishmen settled in England 
maintain a political faith more extreme and resolute than the 
Irish in any other part of the world. The Irish in England 
were from the very first on the side of Mr. Parnell. They are 
usually enrolled in some organisation more or less intimately 
affiliated with the similar organisation in Ireland. At this period 
the name of the English organisation was the Home Rule Con- 
federation, and Mr. Butt was its president. At the annual 
convention of the Confederation at the close of 1877, Mr. Butt 
was deposed and Mr. Parnell was elected in his place. The 
man who proposed the change bore to Butt that extraordinary 
affection with which this weak, kindly, unassuming, and child- 
ishly simple old man w T as accustomed to inspire nearly every 
man, and could with difficulty maintain his composure as he 
gave the tottering Caesar the fatal stab. 

Mr. Butt now virtually retired from the leadership of the 
Home Rule party. His resignation of his position was not 
accepted, and he was induced to retain at least the nominal 
lead of the party. He accepted on the condition that his 
attendance should not be regular ; this condition was for the 
purpose of allowing him to devote his attention to his practice. 
Like O'Connell, he had virtually to abandon his profession 
when he undertook the duties of parliamentary leadership. In 
this way his already vast load of debt had been increased, 
and his hours of waking and sleeping were tortured by duns, 
threats of proceedings, and all the other shifts and worries of 
the impecunious. His quarrel with the 'obstructives' had now 
come to interfere with his financial as well as with his poli- 
tical position. A national subscription had been started. In 
Ireland the response of the people to the needs of their 
leaders has often been bountifully generous, more often than 
perhaps in any other country ; but those who depend on the 



284 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

assistance of the public are subject to the chances of fortune 
that always dog the dependents in any degree on the popular 
mood. There are times and seasons when even the most 
popular leader will not receive one-tenth of the support which 
would be given in more favourable circumstances, and the 
popular leader dependent for his living on the pence of the 
people has the life of the gambler or the theatrical specu- 
lator. The support of the people had been definitely trans- 
ferred from Mr. Butt to Mr. Parnell, and financial support 
followed the tide of popular favour. The subscription was a 
miserable failure, and Butt was now without any resource but 
his profession. 

But the time had passed when he could do anything there. 
The weakness of the heart's action, which had pursued him 
from his early years, was rapidly becoming worse, and in 
1878 there were many warnings of the approaching end. In 
that year he made the remark to a friend, speaking of some 
troublesome symptoms from his heart, ' Is not this the curfew 
bell, warning us that the light must be put out and the fire 
extinguished ? ' 

Still he fought on, attending the law courts daily, and 
now and then joining in a desperate attempt to meet his daily 
triumphant opponents. 

His last appearance was at a meeting in Molesworth Hall 
on February 4, 1879. He was at this time engaged in the 
cause celebre of Bagot v. Bagot. 

The appearance of the old man at this meeting has left a 
deep and a sad impression on the minds of all those who were 
present. When he came in the. look of death was on his 
face ; the death of his hopes and his spirits had already come. 
There were many faces among those around that once had 
lighted at his look and that' now turned away in estrange- 
ment. ' Won't you speak to me ? ' he said in trembling tones 
to one man who had been his associate in many fights and 
amid many stirring scenes But his old persuasive eloquence 
was still as fresh as ever, and he defended his whole policy 
with a vigour, plausibility, a closeness of reasoning that were 
worthy of his best days. 

This was the last meeting he ever attended. The next 



ISAAC BUTT 285 

day he fell sick. The heart had at last refused to do its 
work ; the brain could no longer be supplied ; he lingered 
for nearly a month with his great intellect obscured, and on 
May 5, 1879, he died. 

The people retained a kindly feeling for him to the end, 
but he had unquestionably outlived his usefulness ; and his 
triumph over Mr. Parnell at this period of Irish history would 
have been a national calamity that might have brought hideous 
disasters. Sufficient time has elapsed since his death to pro- 
nounce a calm estimate of his career. The unwisdom of his 
policy was largely due undoubtedly to the difficulties of his 
circumstances. He had a wretched party — with one honest 
and unselfish man to five self-seekers — but he laid the foun- 
dations of a great party in the future, and, more than any 
other man, he prepared the people for the new struggle for 
self-government. It was his misfortune to come at the un- 
happy interval of transition from the bad and old and hope- 
less order of things to a new and a better and brighter 
epoch. Between the era of 1865 and the era of 1878 Ireland 
was, so far as constitutional movements were concerned, in a 
political morass. It was Butt that carried the country over 
that dangerous ground. His foot was light, and slippery, and 
timid ; but the ground over which he had to pass was 
treacherous, perilous, and full of invisible and bottomless 
pools. 

But all the same, it was well for Ireland that Butt died at 
this moment. The country was again approaching one of those 
crises the outcome of which was to mean either a re-plunge 
into the Slough of Despond, such as she had been immersed in 
from 1845 to 1865, or the start of a new era of hope, effort, 
and prosperity. If Butt had survived, and had retained the 
leadership, there is little doubt that he would have been in- 
capable of rising to the height of the argument, and would 
have counselled shilly-shallying where shilly-shallying meant 
death, and moderation where extreme courses were required 
to avert a national disaster, wholesale, violent, and perhaps 
fatal ; or, if he had not retained the full leadership by the de- 
struction of the rising efforts of Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar, 
and if he and they still remained in political existence, and to 



286 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

some extent in political alliance, then there would have been 
divided counsels ; and the time was one for unity All the 
meanness and servility and half-heartedness of the country 
would have found in Butt a rallying-point, and the crisis was 
one that demanded all the energy and courage and concen- 
trated purpose of the country. For the year of 1879 was at 
hand. 



!S 7 



CHAPTER IX. 

FAMINE AGAIN! 

BEFORE coming to 1 879, a few words more on the progress 
of Mr, Parnell. The arrangement in the Home Rule party 
was to elect, not a leader by that name, but a sessional chair- 
man. Mr. Shaw was elected as the successor of Mr. Butt. 
The selection was regarded at the time as rather happy. Mr. 
Shaw was a banker, and represented well the conviction of 
cool, unemotional business men that the union was fatal to 
the material interests of Ireland. He was, besides, a Protes- 
tant, and in the politics of a country so intensely Catholic as 
Ireland it is, curiously enough, an advantage to belong to a 
creed different from that of the majority of the people. It was 
supposed, too, that Mr. Shaw would not fall into the same mis- 
take in dealing with Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar as had been 
committed by Mr. Butt ; if he could not approve or join in 
all their proceedings as the leader of a regular army, at least 
he might not object to the services they rendered him as 
guerilleros. 

Meantime the Ministry was about to supply Mr. Parnell 
with the best of all justifications for his policy. It has been 
seen with what contemptuous scorn the Government rejected 
all Mr. Butt's proposed reforms. Mr. Butt and his methods 
had thus been flouted for three years ; within one year of the 
growth of ' obstruction,' the Government proceeded to bring 
forward concessions to Ireland. In the session of 1878 they 
introduced an Intermediate Education Bill. This was es- 
pecially satisfactory to Mr. Parnell ; his practical mind judges 
every policy by its results, and he was now able to show 
to the Irish people a practical result from his policy. In 
this session, too, a curious testimony was given to his grow- 
ing position. A committee was appointed to consider the 



288 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

question of obstruction, and the means by which it should be 
met. Mr. Parnell was appointed one of the members of this 
committee ; and there was a certain sense of mingled dis- 
gust, amusement, and admiration at the skill with which Mr. 
Parnell cross-examined the different witnesses who were called 
to bear testimony against himself. Without ever changing 
countenance, or losing temper, or saying a hasty, or a rude, or 
an impatient word, he took the Speaker and Mr. Raikes point 
by point through the whole genesis and nature of obstruction 
till he compelled them to give it that exactness of definition 
which made it the more difficult to deal with. The sight of 
this gentleman, calmly asking what was ' obstruction,' at the 
moment when the whole press and all the Parliament of 
England were howling at him as an unscrupulous and persis- 
tent practician of the art of obstruction, had something very 
curious about it. 

In the session of 1879 Mr. Parnell succeeded, after his 
dexterous fashion, in catching hold of a subject upon which 
it was possible to address the House with great frequency 
and at great length. The Army Regulation Bill, among 
other things, regulated the question of flogging. Mr. Parnell 
knew that there 'were a certain number of members among 
the Liberals who strongly objected to this form of punishment, 
and he determined to utilise their feeling. On the other 
hand, there were many among the Liberals who were shrewd 
enough to see that this v/as a question upon which it was 
possible to raise a considerable amount of popular feeling. 
A general election was impending, and the abolition of 
flogging in the army naturally presented itself as a very good 
cry for catching the voters. In the previous session, Mr. 
Parnell and Mr. Biggar had been left to fight the question of 
flogging alone. Now the curious spectacle was presented of 
the Irish ' obstructives ' being supported by Mr. Chamberlain 
and several other prominent and promising members of the 
Radical section. In the end, Parnell and Biggar, seeing how 
well their purpose was being served by the Liberal opposition, 
drew slightly into the background, and allowed the question 
to be practically taken out of their hands ; and this brought 
curious developments. As Mr. Parnell had been left fighting 



FAMINE AGAIN 289 

the battle against flogging alone when he began the struggle, 
so Mr. Chamberlain was left alone by the orthodox Liberals 
when he took it up. In the same way, too, as Mr. Parnell 
had been vehemently attacked by the whole force of the two 
parties combined in his early days of assault upon the lash, 
the persistence of Mr. Chamberlain's agitation of the question 
in the House drew down upon him a rebuke from the Marquis 
of Hartington, and there was a sharp scene between the 
two. But in the end the agitation against the lash became 
strong enough to be taken up by the orthodox Liberals, and 
in the same way as Parnell was succeeded by Chamberlain, 
Chamberlain was succeeded by Lord Hartington and the 
Liberal leaders. The result of this was that the lash became 
one of the prominent subjects of debate between the two 
parties, and in more than one constituency a Conservative 
member was hounded out of public life by the vehement 
speeches of Liberals upon the question. 

It is needless to say that Mr. Parnell was not allowed to 
go through the sessions of 1878 and 1879 without occasionally 
passing through storms of the most tempestuous violence. 

He was denounced by Ministers and by the leaders of the 
Opposition, and was over and over again repudiated by the 
members of his own party, who were delighted by the un- 
usual incident of attentive and enthusiastic Houses. It would 
be useless to cumber the narrative with any record of these 
utterances by forgotten slaves. 

By way of illustrating the sweet and gentlemanly delicacy 
of the observations of some London journals on Mr. Parnell, 
the following passages from a writer already quoted, may not 
be uninstructive nor, indeed, unamusing : — 

Mr. Parnell is always at a white heat of rage, and makes with 
savage earnestness fancifully ridiculous statements, such as you may 
hear from your partner in the quadrille if you have the good fortune 
to be a guest at the annual ball at Colney Hatch. — World, March 29, 
1876. 

The writer who cherishes a real affection of Ireland, and who has 
an unaffected admiration for the genius of her sons, bitterly reproaches 
Meath that it should have wronged Ireland by making such scenes 
possible under the eye of the House. — World, March 29, 1S76. 



290 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Mr. Biggar, though occasionally endurable, is invariably grotesque. 
, . . but Mr. Parnell has no redeeming qualities, unless we regard it 
as an advantage to have in the House a man who unites in his own 
person all the childish unreasonableness of the ill-regulated suspicion, 
and all the childish credulity, of the Irish peasant, without any of 
the humour, the courtliness, or dash of the Irish gentleman. — World, 
March 29, 1876. 

Meantime events were developing in Ireland which were 
destined to mould his future and to meet his career at the 
true psychological moment. The Land Act of 1870, as I 
have already told, had been put forward by Mr. Gladstone 
and his supporters in the House of Commons as a just and 
final settlement of the Land question. It has been seen that 
no Irish popular leader really acquainted with the facts of the 
case, like Mr. Butt or Sir John Gray, believed in 1870 that 
these views of the Act would be justified. It has also been 
seen that in all the years which elapsed between 1 870 and 
1879 there was scarcely a session during which an attempt 
was not made to remove the defects of the measure and to 
apply a really effective remedy -to the evils of the agrarian 
system. 

What had been the state of Ireland since 1870? The 
Land Act of 1870 made no provision against rack-rent; 
rack-renting went on in many parts of Ireland, especially 
in the province of Ulster, more relentlessly and continuously 
than perhaps ever before. Eviction was but partly provided 
against by an arrangement that compelled the landlord to 
give compensation for disturbance. It was supposed, and 
perhaps intended by Mr. Gladstone, that this compensation 
should bear some relation to the loss of the tenant ; but in a 
country where the land supplied a man with the only means 
of livelihood, it was plain that the only compensation which 
would really supply the place of his lost farm would be 
a compensation that would give him an income for the 
remainder of his days. Thus compensation for disturbance 
was, in Ireland, practically a contradiction in terms ; to 
talk of a man being compensated for disturbance was the 
same thing as to talk of the compensating of an ocean waif 
for the loss of the raft which alone gives . him a hope of 
safety. In the next place, the courts to which the question 



FAMINE AGAIN 291 

of disturbance was referred had prejudices and concep- 
tions on the relations between landlord and tenant which 
rendered it absolutely impossible for them to administer 
justice. It must be remembered, as one of the leading facts 
of this whole controversy, that the whole bent of the land law 
in Ireland, not for years or for generations, but for centuries, 
was to make the landlord omnipotent ; that the lawyers 
dealing with the question, whether Protestant or Catholic, 
Conservative or Liberal, were saturated with the principles of 
a law founded on this basis ; and that, therefore, the rights of 
the tenants were often honestly held to be legally infinitesimal. 
Finally, there was no provision — at least no adequate pro- 
vision — in the Land Act of 1 870 for compensation for disturb- 
ance in cases where the tenant was unable to pay the rent. 
This also was contrary to the spirit of the Act, because Mr. 
Gladstone plainly laid down, in discussing the Bill, that over 
and above his right for any improvements he might have 
made upon the soil, the tenant was entitled to compensation 
from the mere fact of being disturbed or evicted ; and it was 
plainly the spirit of the Land Act of 1 870 that, even when 
the tenant was unable to pay his rent, eviction should not 
necessarily deprive him of compensation for his own pro- 
perty in the shape of improvements added to the land. But as 
the law stood, or was interpreted, the way the Act of 1870 
worked was that the landlord was enabled, on the one hand 
to raise the rent to the highest point he thought fit ; that the 
tenant could only obtain compensation for eviction ; and finally 
that when either through the rack-rent or bad seasons the 
tenant was unable to pay his rent, all his improvements could 
be confiscated by the landlord, and he himself be thrown upon 
the world without house, without resources, without mercy. 

It was obvious to anybody who considered the Irish Land 
question with an impartial mind that legislation of this kind 
could only be endured as long as the people were utterly inca- 
pable of having it mended. Another fact was equally obvious, 
that it only required the strain of a few bad seasons to reduce 
the greater portion of the tenantry of Ireland to a state of 
bankruptcy. And, finally, with the farmers dependent for the 
most part on a crop whose fickleness had been proved by 



2Q2 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

such tragic testimony in the previous history of Ireland, it 
was plain that such stress was bound at some period to come. 
It is an instructive commentary on the effect of the 
government of Ireland from Westminster that, seventy-nine 
years after the Act of Union, the farmers remained in practi- 
cally the same position as at the beginning of the century ; that 
in these seventy-nine years there had been two famines, one 
among the most tragic in the awful depths of its horrors and 
sufferings of all human events ; and that, after two famines, the 
country was approaching a third. In 1879 too, as in 1846, 
the potato crop could without exaggeration be described as 
the thin partition which stood between famine and a vast 
number of the Irish tenantry. Let us take this fact in con- 
nection with the following figures showing the depreciation in 
the potato crop for the years 1876, 1877 and 1878. 

Value. 1 

1876 £12,464,382 

1877 5,271,822 

1878 7>579v5 12 

There was hope, of course, that 1879 would repair the loss 
which had been inflicted by the two previous years ; but 1879, 
instead of bringing relief, aggravated the disaster, and brought 
a supreme .national crisis. The state of the weather and the 
reports from the country showed clearly to any observer of 
the time that a disaster was impending that might, unless 
properly met, plunge Ireland into the odious and tragic 
horrors of 1846 and 1847. Another circumstance tended 
very much to aggravate the distress in the poorer parts of 
the country. It is the habit of a considerable section of the 
farmers of Mayo, Galway, and Donegal to migrate to Eng- 
land and Scotland for the harvest season every year. The 
sums which they thus earned by the migration, calculated at 
about 100,000/., went, not to their wives and families, but 
to the landlord. Labour for English and Scotch farmers 
was part of the tribute they had yearly to pay to their oppres- 
sors. It was, indeed, a peculiarity of the Irish land system 
that it pursued the Irish race wherever that race went. The 

1 Thonfs Directory. 



FAMINE AGAIN 293 

son or daughter of the Irish farmer who had emigrated to 
America, or Australia, or New Zealand did not leave behind 
in Ireland the curse of his race. The wages earned as a 
labourer, or a servant-maid, or a miner, or a sheep-farmer in 
any of these places of exile went home to help their parents 
in their yearly deepening poverty, through their yearly in- 
creasing rent. It has been calculated that between the years 
1848 and 1864 no less a sum than 13,000,000/. was sent by 
the Irish in America to their people at home. 1 The people at 
home, in the meantime, remained either in the same condition 
or usually sank deeper into the mire of inextricable poverty. 
In other words, the money sent from the Irish in America did 
the farmer no good, it was all swallowed up by the Irish 
landlord ; it was part of the world-wide tribute this caste was 
able to extort. This incontestable fact adds another element 
of humour to the complaint of the landlord class that the sub- 
scriptions which were brought into the Irish National League 
by the Irish race in America and Australia came mostly 
from servant-girls, and much rhetoric was expended from the 
same quarter in denunciation of the agitators who lived on 
their hard-won wages. These denunciations, which, as a 
matter of fact, were not founded upon truth, would have been 
more becoming if they had not proceeded from a class which 
had been for a generation the greatest tax and the most pro- 
minent burden of the servant-girls of New York, Chicago, 
Melbourne, and every other city where exiled Irish labour 
seeks the market it has been refused at home. 

The loss of the migratory labourers in 1877 is calculated 
by Dr. Wilson Hancock at 2 5o,ooo/. 2 The amount of 
value of the potato in 1879 3 was 3,341,028/. In other 
words, two-thirds of the entire potato crop was gone, 
and in some parts of the country the crop was entirely 
gone. ' The potato crop,' said the Registrar-General, ' will 
be deficient in every province, county, and union.' ' The 
salient point is,' says the same authority, 'that in 1878 the 
estimated produce of potatoes in Ireland was 50,530,080 cwts., 
the average for ten years being 60,752,918 cwts., whereas the 

1 Lord Dufferin quoted by Healy, p. 49. 2 Healy, p. 72. s lb. 



294 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

estimated yield for 1879 is only 22,273,520 cwts., a most 
alarming decrease.' ' The meaning of these figures is unmis- 
takable. Famine was coming again ! 

The next factor in the situation is the action of the land- 
lords. The English reader will at once assume that, in the 
face of a great emergency like this, there would have been a 
tendency on the part of the owners of the soil to take their 
share of the calamity that threatened the entire Irish nation. 
During the agricultural crisis of these three years the English 
landlords had accepted the common lot, and there was scarcely 
a newspaper which did not contain the announcement of an 
abatement of rent by the landlords of England — abatements 
rising from ten to fifty per cent., and in many cases to the 
whole of the half-year's rent. The English landlords were 
considerate enough, and it may be added wise enough, to 
make these abatements ; but the Irish landlord adopted no 
such method. 

And here let it be remarked that one of the insurmount- 
able difficulties of the Irish question is that things bear the 
same name in England and Ireland without having the same 
meaning. Thus, the Irish and the English owners of the soil 
are both known by the name of landlords, yet is there no 
similarity whatever in the relations of the two to the general 
tenure of land or to the tillers of the soil. It has already 
been shown how the relation differs : first, in the great essen- 
tial point that the landlord, in England, supplies the farm- 
houses, the farm buildings, the drainage, and practically all 
the other outfit of a farm ; while in Ireland the contribution 
of the landlord has been confined to the bare soil. It is 
known that the occupier in Ireland was, as a rule, a small 
farmer, while in England the occupier was usually a large 
farmer who invested a considerable capital in land. But the 
moral difference between the relations was still greater. In 
England the community of race, and generally of creed, as 
well as a strong sense of duty in the landlord class and a 
healthy public opinion, often made the relations between the 
owner and the occupier of the soil kindly. If one is to judge 

1 Quoted by Healy, p. 71. 



FAMINE AGAIN 295 

of these relations by their portraiture in fiction, it has been 
regarded as a duty by the men and women of the squire's 
household to attend to the wants of those placed beneath 
them. The Lady Bountiful who visits the sick agricultural 
labourer, and gives him both physical and spiritual consola- 
tion, is one of the stock characters in English fiction, and, 
I assume also, in English life. All such relations as these 
between the family of the Irish landlord and that of the Irish 
tenant are practically unknown. Between them there is a 
chasm of difference of race and creed, with the contempt of a 
master to a serf on the one hand and the sullen hatred of the 
serf to the master on the other. The relation between the 
Irish landlord and the Irish tenant bore far more resem- 
blance to that between the French nobleman and the French 
peasant in pre-revolutionary days, than to that between the 
English squires and the English farmer or labourer of the 
present day. This difference has always been one of the diffi- 
culties in the way of obtaining land reform. The English 
landlords, conscious of the kindly relations subsisting between 
them and their dependents, naturally rejected as loathsome 
calumnies the stories told of the relations between the body 
of the Irish people and men called by the same name, speak- 
ing the same language— intimates, associates, and relatives. 
And thus it was that stories of wholesale clearances, in cir- 
cumstances of shocking and heartrending cruelty ; of the 
razing of cabins which the tenant had built with his own 
hands and at his own expense ; of his expulsion from the plot 
of ground, the rent of which had been raised to a degree im- 
possible of payment, solely because the tenant himself had 
transformed it from a barren and rocky mountain slope into 
a garden of fertility ; — stories such as these were told to ears 
that were closed by the scepticism of invincible ignorance 
and of false analogy. 

The action of the Irish landlords in 1879 justified their 
whole traditions. It may be summed up in a sentence : the 
deeper grew the distress of farmers, the more exacting be- 
came the demands and the more merciless became the 
attitude of the landlords. Here are the official figures 
upon the subject, and they may be left to tell their own tale : 



296 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Evictions. 
1876 ....... 1269 

* 8 77 i3 2 3 

1878 . . . . . . . 1749 

1879 2667 

It was at first sight apparently one of the tragic facts of 
the case that the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland at this period 
of impending and awful disaster was held by such a man as 
Mr. James Lowther. The character of Mr. Lowther is now 
pretty well known. The appointment of such a person, with 
his illiterate mind, his mediaeval and impenetrable ignorance, 
his bold but perilous stubbornness, was universally regarded 
as one of the jokes by which Lord Beaconsfield occasionally 
gratified the wanton caprice of great power. Even before the 
crisis of 1879, Mr. Lowther had given open expression to the 
treatment which any proposals to deal with the relations of 
landlord and tenant would meet with from him. He has 
the sinister courage of his senseless convictions, and to-day 
openly preaches those protectionist doctrines which are 
generally supposed, among all English politicians of intelli- 
gence, to be as dead as the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. 
Thus, while the majority of his party had accepted the land 
legislation of 1870 as an accomplished fact, Mr. Lowther 
still maintained his attitude of dull and unchangeable protest. 
The Land Act of 1870, he declared, in debate on a motion of 
Mr. Butt, was ' undiluted communism.' 

As if to deepen the contrast between the condition of 
Ireland and the tenure of the Chief Secretary's office by such 
a man, Mr. Lowther was accustomed to clothe his thoughts 
in a brusque humour that smacked somewhat of the stable, 
but at the same time was not unamusing. Of him at that 
period the story used to be told that, when addressing his 
constituents on his appointment as Under Secretary for the 
Colonies, he was asked to say something about colonial affairs. 
' Oh, don't let us talk shop,' was the audacious and comical 
reply. But the Irish people were not in the condition to 
relish jokes, especially at their own expense ; and to Irish- 
men acquainted with the history of their country, it seemed 
an almost intolerable aggravation of their lot that this hope- 



FAMINE AGAIN 297 

lessly ignorant and densely obstinate man should grin, 
buffoonlike, as the succession of scenes in the national tragedy 
unveiled themselves before his eyes. 

During the earlier months of 1879 the attention of the 
Chief Secretary had been called more than once to the cala- 
mity that was impending over Ireland. He received all 
these statements with easy and jaunty denials. At last, on 
May 27, when the House was adjourning for the Whitsuntide 
recess, the Irish members made a final attempt to force the 
condition of the country upon the attention of the Chief 
Secretary. Mr. McCarthy, the late Mr. A. M. Sullivan, 
Mr. O'Donnell, Mr. O'Connor Power, Mr. Mitchell Henry, all 
asked for some declaration on the part of the Government 
which would show that they were acquainted with the real 
state of things, and that they were preparing some remedy for 
it. Entreaty, argument, intimate acquaintance with the facts 
of the case— graphic pictures of the dire distress of the 
country — all were lost on Mr. Lowther. He was ready to go 
so far as to acknowledge that there was ' some ' depression 
in the agriculture of Ireland ; but he went on to say, he was 
glad to think that that depression, although undoubted, was 
' neither so prevalent nor so acute as the depression existing 
in other parts of the United Kingdom.' J 

Such was the pronouncement of Mr. Lowther, and a result 
followed similar to many such experiences in history. The 
obstinacy of the defender proved the downfall of the institu- 
tion. ' Seldom,' justly remarks Mr. A. M. Sullivan, ' did an 
English minister speak a sentence destined to have more 
memorable results. In that moment Mr. James Lowther sealed 1 , 
the doom of Irish landlordism ; ' 2 for Mr. Lowther's answer 
drove Mr. Parnell into the ranks of the Land League. The 
attitude of Mr. Lowther convinced Mr. Parnell that there was 
no hope from Parliament, that mild methods were no longer 
in place, and that, if Ireland were to be saved from a dreaded 
calamity, resort must be had to desperate expedients. 

The Agrarian movement in Ireland meantime had been 
greatly stimulated by Mr. Davitt. Mr. Davitt had the advan- 
tage which Gambetta had in the politics of republican France ; 

1 Hansard, vol. ccxlvi. p. 246. 2 New Ireland, p. 438. 



293 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

he had a legend. He had but a short time before been liberated 
from penal servitude. To have been a convict by English law 
for devotion to Ireland is held, and justly held, by Irishmen to 
be the best passport to their confidence and affections. There 
was a singularly dramatic appropriateness in Mr. Davitt 
being one of the leaders of an agrarian revolt. His history 
was the history of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, 
and the rapacity and cruelty of landlordism was the central- 
fact that moved and coloured it all. 

Michael Davitt was born in 1846, near the small village of 
Straid, in the county of Mayo. His father was a farmer who 
was among the many thousand victims of those wholesale 
evictions in that dread period which have been fully described 
in previous pages of this book. Mr. Davitt was but four 
years of age when he saw his home destroyed. His father 
and mother came to England, ' and had to beg through the 
streets of England for bread.' The family settled in the little 
town of Haslingden in Lancashire. His mother was in the 
habit of frequently repeating the details of this cruel and 
memorable episode in his earliest years ; and, undoubtedly, 
it was this eviction scene which influenced the fortunes of his 
entire family, and has been the fiercest incentive of Davitt's 
attitude towards landlordism ever 'since. Over and over again 
references to this incident occur in his speeches. Replying 
once to an ungenerous attack made upon him, which appeared 
under the name of the late Archbishop MacHale, though 
probably never written by him, he wrote : — 

Some twenty-five years ago my father was ejected from a small 
holding near the parish of Straid, in Mayo, because unable to pay a 
rent which the crippled state of his resources, after struggling through 
the famine years, rendered impossible. Trials and sufferings in exile 
for a quarter of a century, in which I became physically disabled for 
life, a father's grave dug beneath American soil, myself the only 
member ever destined to live or die in Ireland, and this privilege 
existing only by virtue of ' ticket of leave,' are the consequence which 
followed that eviction. 1 

When he was still a child he was sent to a mill to work, 

1 D. B. Cashman's Life of Michael Davitt, p. 96. 




/fe^4^ %)azz£& 



FAMINE AGAIN 299 

and there he was by an accident deprived of his right arm. 
At this time he had received but the merest rudiments of 
education, and this accident obtained for him the advantage 
of another instalment of instruction. At eleven years of 
age he secured employment in the local post-office ; and as 
the postmaster had also a business in printing and stationery, 
Mr. Davitt had an opportunity of taking an occasional peep 
at books. 1 

In this way he had already attained to some prominence 
among the Irishmen of his district ; but up to this time he 
had not formed strong national opinions ; or, if there were 
the germs of such opinions in his mind, they had not assumed 
definite shape. One night he went to hear an address on 
an Irish subject. The wrongs of Ireland were narrated 
by an eloquent tongue. All the latent forces and unformed 
notions in Mr. Davitt's nature were at once crystallised ; 
and from that hour forward he was an ardent Irish Nation- 
alist. He soon became an active member of the Fenian 
organisation, and he took part in the attempted seizure of 
Chester Castle. ' Unable to shoulder a rifle with his single 
arm, he carried a small store of cartridges in a bag made from 
a pocket-handkerchief.' 2 

After the failure of the enterprise he managed to escape 
arrest and return to Haslingden ; but he soon entered on 
active operations again in connection with the movement, and 
was employed in the work of purchasing arms and forwarding 
them to Ireland. On May 14, 1870, he was arrested in London 
along with an Englishman named John Wilson, a gunsmith 
of Birmingham, and he was convicted mainly on the evidence 
of an informer named Corydon — and sentenced to fifteen years' 
penal servitude. He was often subjected, like the other Irish 
political prisoners, to that brutality of punishment which 
England and Russia are alone among European countries in 
inflicting upon political prisoners. It is impossible for a man 
of any nationality to read his own account of the sufferings 
and indignities through which he had to pass without feelings 
of burning anger. A rebel against laws which had broken up 
his home, impoverished and exiled those dearest to him, he 

1 Land of Eire, by John Devoy, p. 38. " lb. p. 38. 



300 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

had resorted to the only weapons which then seemed capable 
of arresting the attention of that country whose apathy to 
Irish ruin Mr. Gladstone has so well described, and he was 
but ante-dating reforms, most of which have since passed into 
law ; but he was sent to herd with murderers, pickpockets, 
and burglars, passed through solitary confinement, or was 
overworked, underfed, and exposed to all changes of the 
seasons. 

At last, on Wednesday morning, December 19, 1877- - 
after seven years and seven months of this dread suffering — 
he was released. A series of enthusiastic receptions awaited 
him and three other Fenian prisoners who had been released 
about the same time, namely, Colour-Sergeant McCarthy, 
Corporal Thomas Chambers, and Private John P. Bryan. It 
had been constantly denied that Sergeant McCarthy had been 
ill-treated in prison, and asserted that his health had in no 
way suffered. Two days after his arrival in Dublin, however, 
McCarthy gave testimony that could no longer be denied. 
Mr. Davitt, McCarthy, and the two other released prisoners 
had been invited by Mr. Parnell to breakfast with him in 
Morrisson's Hotel. While they were awaiting breakfast, 
McCarthy was observed to grow pale and totter across the 
room, and, having been laid on the sofa, in a few moments he 
was dead. The twelve years of penal servitude had at last 
done their work. 

Mr. Davitt then proceeded on a lecturing tour throughout 
England and Scotland. Later on, he determined to go to 
America to see his mother and other relatives who had settled 
in the town of Manayunk in Pennsylvania. He landed in 
New York about the beginning of August, 1878. At this 
time he had very few acquaintances in America ; ' he soon, 
however, came in contact with some leading Irishmen settled 
in that country, and made a favourable impression upon 
them. Meantime, events had occurred which had prepared 
the way for the agitation. in which Mr. Davitt afterwards 
played so prominent a part. In the early days of the revolu- 
tionary party, a fundamental doctrine, as has been mentioned, 
was that not only was constitutional agitation futile, but it 

1 Uevoy, p. 40. 



FAMINE AGAIN 301 

was so prejudicial that all true Nationalists were bound to 
make war against it. Some of the intelligent leaders among 
the Nationalists in America had begun to see that this policy 
was impracticable ; and to these views a clear expression was 
given in an able letter written by Mr. John Devoy. This 
communication started what came to be known as the ' new 
departure ' in Irish politics. A fundamental principle of this 
new departure was that attention should be directed to the 
reform of the land system of Ireland, and the establishment 
of Peasant Proprietary. Mr. Davitt had, after various consul- 
tations with Mr. Devoy and others, formed an outline of 
a land movement ; but his ideas were still in a crude and 
indefinite shape. 1 

When he returned to Ireland he met with very serious 
obstacles. The newspaper which at the time was supposed 
to speak the opinions of the revolutionary party, denounced 
the ' new departure ' as an insidious conspiracy, with the 
object of seducing believers in ' physical force ' doctrines to 
the treacherous paths of constitutional agitation ; and several 
times Mr. Davitt was tempted to give up the attempt in 
despair of carrying out the movement. However, time and the 
seasons fought upon his side. Widespread distress threatened 
to be most severe in the West, and, curiously enough, there 
already existed in that region the germs of a land movement. 

The tenants had kept up some form of association from 
the moment at which the worthlessness of the Land Act of 
1870 was discovered. In Dublin, for instance, there was an 
organisation known as ' The Central Tenants' Defence Asso- 
ciation,' the object of which was the attainment of what 
afterwards became known as the ' Three F's.' There was also 
a local organisation which afterwards perhaps did more than 
any other to beget the Land League ; this was the Tenants' 
Defence Association of Ballinasloe. The foremost figure of 
this association was a man named Matthew Harris. Matthew 
Harris is one of the most interesting and striking figures of 
the Irish movements of the last thirty years. During all this 
period he has devoted himself with self-sacrificing and un- 
remitting zeal to the attainment of complete redress of his 

1 Devoy, p. 49. 



3 o2 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

country's grievances. In this respect politics are with him 
an absorbing passion, almost a religion. In pursuit of this 
high and noble end he has risked death, lost liberty, ruined 
his business prospects. Eager, enthusiastic, vehement, he has 
at the same time that grim tenacity of purpose by which 
forlorn hopes are changed into triumphant fruitions. He has 
fought the battle against landlordism in the dark as well as 
in the brightest hour with unshaken resolution. Reared in 
the country, from an early age he saw landlordism in its 
worst shape and aspect ; -his childish recollections are of 
cruel and heartless evictions. Thus it is that in every move- 
ment for the liberation of the farmer or of Ireland during the 
last thirty years he has been a conspicuous figure, as hopeful, 
energetic, laborious in the hour of despair, apathy, and lassi- 
tude, as in times of universal vigour, exultation, and activity. 

Matthew Harris had made war on landlordism, which in 
the county of Galway has been particularly atrocious for many 
years before the Land League was thought of, and in this 
way became the germ of a new movement. But it was not 
in the county of Galway that this movement took its birth. 
Mr. Davitt, as has been seen, was a native of the neighbouring 
county of Mayo, and there he determined to make the first 
start. 

Meetings were primarily held for the purpose of in- 
ducing the landlords to reduce the rents. The Land League 
may be dated from one of these meetings. This was a 
gathering which assembled on April 20, 1879, at Irishtown, in 
the county of Mayo. This meeting was convened for the 
purpose of protesting against some acts of oppression on the 
part of the landlords of the district. The promoters of the 
meeting were Mr. Davitt and Mr. Brennan, the latter after- 
wards secretary of the Land League. Mr. Davitt did not 
attend the meeting, and the chief speaker at it was Mr. 
O'Connor Power, M.P. 

Several other meetings followed. The deepening distress 
among the farmers and the increase of evictions by the land- 
lords supplied an impetus which had the effect of advancing 
the movement with extraordinary rapidity. The times, in fact, 
were ripe for an agrarian revolt. But as yet the movement was 



FAMINE AGAIN 303 

local and obscure. Scarcely any reports found their way into 
the metropolitan newspapers, and the country was generally 
unconscious of the portentous new birth. One of the reasons 
of this was that most of the gentlemen who had started this 
movement, though their names afterwards came to be world- 
wide, were at this period comparatively unknown, and filled 
no large space in the public eye. There was one man who 
had already attained prominence as the figure which had the 
greatest hold upon the affections of the country, and who 
seemed to present, in his own person, some chance of being 
the rallying-point of an advanced movement. This man, of 
course, was Mr. Parnell. But Mr. Parnell, busy in Parliament, 
had as yet made little or no sign. He had spoken upon the 
Land question ; his views were well known to be favourable to 
a large change in the system, but he had not given in his 
adhesion to the new movement, which seemed not only to 
propose revolutionary and perilous remedies for the imme- 
diate evil, but a final settlement of the question that went far 
beyond the most sanguine dreams hitherto indulged in by 
even the most ardent legislator. 

But, deservedly great as was the influence of Mr. Davitt, 
and immense as were his exertions, the movement could not 
be said yet to have reached its pinnacle until the leader came 
to whom, at this moment, the eyes and hopes and affections 
of all Irish Nationalists were gradually turning. 

One of the great forces which had inspired the hope 
and strength that made the new movement possible was the 
spirit excited throughout Ireland by the attitude of Mr. Parnell 
and Mr. Biggar in the House of Commons. The scenes- - 
vexatious, indecorous, wanton, or boorish, as they appeared 
to the English public — were to the people of Ireland the 
electric messages of new hopes. Every word of these scenes 
was read with fierce and breathless eagerness. The repre- 
sentatives of a country trodden under foot for centuries were 
seen in the citadel of the enemy, aggressive and defiant. 
The Parliament that trampled upon every Irish demand for 
so many generations was seen raging in hysteric and impotent 
fury against the growing omnipotence of two determined men. 
The movement that starts from 1879 will not be understood 



304 . THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

unless the fact is grasped that Ireland at that moment was 
living under the burning glow of parliamentary ' obstruc- 
tion.' The temper which this fact produced was the original 
impulse in preventing the farmers of 1879 from lying down, 
dumb, helpless, and cowering, under eviction, famine, and 
plague, as had been done by their fathers in 1846-47. 

The position Mr. Parnell had already attained marked 
him out as a man who, if he undertook the leadership of a 
movement, would carry it through every defile of difficulty 
and danger to the end. He was rapidly becoming the idol 
of the people, who could fuse their passions and their affec- 
tions into a united and mighty effort. The victories he had 
already won gave him the prestige of a child of destiny before 
whom hosts of enemies and gigantic obstacles melted into 
vaporous impotence. For a considerable time Mr. Parnell 
hesitated before taking a step beyond ' the three F's,' but at 
last he crossed the Rubicon and joined the ranks of those who 
declared that the struggle on the Land question should only 
end with the transfer of the proprietorship of the soil from 
the landlord to the tiller. 

This was to be the final settlement of the question ; but, 
meanwhile, the wolf was at the door. How was the emer- 
gency of deepening distress, of ever-advancing famine and 
ever-increasing eviction to be met ? This was the terrible 
problem which Mr. Parnell had now to face. 

And now I have come to one of the cross-roads in my 
story. All that I have written will have failed in its purpose 
if the reader do not see the road to take at this crisis, clearly 
marked out as with an iron finger. My chief reason in bring- 
ing into this chapter of Irish history an account of 1846 and 
1847 and the years immediately after, was because 1846 and 
1 847 are the background of 1 879 and 1 880. The second epoch 
is entirely unintelligible without a knowledge and true apprecia- 
tion of the first. 1 846 and 1 847 left two memories : the memory 
of the terrible suffering, and the memory of how that suffer- 
ing was submitted to. Ever since there has been no feeling 
so bitter in the hearts of Irishmen — especially the hearts of 
young Irishmen — as the feeling that much of the awful 
suffering could have been prevented if the people only had 



FAMINE AGAIN 305 

had the courage to act in their own defence ; to refuse to 
allow food to be exported from a starving nation ; to refuse 
the payment of impossible rents that one man might luxuriate 
in an hour of national cataclysm and tens of thousands perish 
in the agonies of hunger and of typhus fever ; to refuse sub- 
mission to decrees of eviction, and through eviction of death or 
exile from lands brought to fertility by their toil, from houses 
built in their own sweat and blood and tears. And this is 
something more than a mere feeling. The idea will stand 
the test of the severest examination, that in a moment of 
national crisis, such as the Irish famine, the safety of the 
nation demanded some sacrifice on the part of the landlords — 
a sacrifice best if willingly made, as by the landlords in Eng- 
land and in Scotland ; in any case, a sacrifice, whether willing 
or unwilling. The principle involved is indeed one that has 
passed from the region of debate to that of the jurisprudence 
of more than one nation. Anybody who will take the trouble 
to read the debates on the Compensation for Disturbance Bill 
will find the instances given from the laws of Rome, and of 
Scotland, and of Canada, in which stress of season is held 
to modify all contracts for rent. In the case of Ireland the 
whole controversy resolves itself into the question, Which is 
the more precious — rent or a nation ? 

The story I have already told of ] 846 and 1847 prove these 
things: (1) that the failure of the potato crop in Ireland is 
liable to be attended with widespread distress and possibly 
with famine ; (2) that widespread distress, and still more 
famine, is pretty certain of being followed in Ireland by destruc- 
tive epidemics ; (3) that the horrors of distress or famine and 
of epidemics will be increased by wholesale clearances by the 
landlords ; (4) that the Imperial Legislature has not the will 
or the power to deal efficiently with such a crisis ; and (5), as 
a consequence of all these, that in a period of potato failure, 
submission by the farmers to the landlords and reliance on the 
Imperial Parliament are calculated to bring about wholesale 
loss of life by hunger or disease or eviction, gigantic waste 
of natural resources through emigration, and a prolonged 
period of national torpor and decay through the loss of hope 
and of strength brought about by those sufferings. 



306 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

I hold that I am called upon to prove this and this alone ; 
that the circumstances of 1 879 and 1 880 bore a sufficiently close 
resemblance to those of 1846 and 1847 to justify a movement 
against rent and against eviction. Was there this resemblance ? 
First, there was the failure of the potato — that I have proved 
by official statistics, and it is not seriously denied by anybody 
any longer ; second, the reality and severity of the distress 
from the failure is proved by testimony so diverse as the 
Relief Committees of the Duchess of Marlborough, of the 
Mansion House and of Mr. Parnell. The peril of whole- 
sale evictions and the sameness of temper of the Irish 
landlords of 1879 as in those of 1846 and 1847 are too 
plainly proved by the yearly increasing number of evictions, 
and the name of Mr. Lowther alone suffices to prove the 
incompetence of the British Legislature. This incompetence 
received, as will be seen, further and stronger proof when an 
enlightened Liberal Minister succeeded to the Tory obscur- 
antist in the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland. 

Mr- Parnell then found the majority of the farmers face 
to face with either of these two dilemmas : If they had all 
the rent, they might give every penny to the landlord, and 
allow themselves, their wives, and their children to perish. If 
they had not the rent, and the landlord insisted on his ' rights,' 
they were subject to eviction on a scale as wholesale as the 
clearances that followed 1846 and 1847. To call upon the 
people, under circumstances like these, to pay all their rent 
was to recommend them to follow the example of 1 846 with the 
sequels of 1847— wholesale starvation and wholesale eviction. 
This was not the policy that recommended itself to Mr. 
Parnell ; such a policy would have been that of a coward and 
a traitor. The first Land meeting attended by Mr. Parnell 
took place at Westport on June 8, 1879. The resolution to 
which Mr. Parnell spoke on this occasion was as follows : 

' That whereas many landlords, by successfully asserting in the 
courts of law their power to arbitrarily increase their rents, irrespec- 
tive of the value of the holdings on their estates, have rendered 
worthless the Land Act of 1870 as a means of protection to the Irish 
tenants, we hereby declare that not only political expediency, but 
jusrice, and the vital interests of Ireland, demand such a readjust- 



FAMINE AGAIN 307 

ment of the land tenure — a readjustment based upon the principle 
that the occupier of the land shall be the owner thereof — as will pre- 
vent further confiscation of the tenant's property by unscrupulous 
landlords, and will secure to the people of Ireland their natural right 
to the soil of their country.' 

Mr. Parnell, in his speech, laid down on clear and distinct 
lines the Land policy of the future and the policy of the hour. 
He declared in favour, not of ' the three F's,' but of Peasant 
Proprietary. 

' In Belgium,' said Mr. Parnell, ' in Prussia, in France, and in 
Russia the land has been given to the people — to the occupiers of 
the land. In some cases the landlords have been deprived of their 
property in the soil by the iron hand of revolution ; in other cases, 
as in Prussia, the landlords have been purchased out. If such an 
arrangement could be made without injuring the landlord, so as to 
enable the tenant to have his land as his own, and to cultivate it as 
it ought to be cultivated, it would be for the benefit and prosperity 
of the country.' 

But this, as he said immediately, was to be regarded as 
the final settlement of the question ; the immediate point was 
what the people were to do in order to avert the calamity 
which was at that moment at their very doors. This was the 
occasion on which he first formulated the policy of resisting 
eviction. This policy he formulated in a phrase which became 
the key-note of the whole agitation. He declared that a fair 
rent had been transformed, by the failure of the potato crop, 
into an exorbitant rent ; that if the rents were insisted upon 
there would be a repetition of the scenes of 1847 and 1848. 

'Now,' he said, 'what must we do in order to induce the land- 
lords to see the position ? You must show the landlords that you 
intend to hold a firm grip of your homesteads and land.' l 

The phrase had such appropriateness to the situation 
and to the time that it at once passed into men's mouths. 
Mr. Parnell has since told the manner in which it suggested 
itself to his mind. While in the train which brought him 
to this meeting he was passing over in memory some of 

1 Freemen? s Journal, June 8, 1879. 



3 o8 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the scenes in which Mr. Biggar and himself had taken part 
in Parliament. He was musing over the deadly tenacity with 
which the member for Cavan always stuck to his purpose. 
Tenacity was translated into the shorter word ' grip,' and 
thus was born the memorable and potent phrase ' hold,' or, 
as it was afterwards expressed, ' keep a firm grip of your 
homesteads and land.'* 

From the moment Mr. Parnell put himself at the head of 
the Land movement it spread with enormous rapidity, and 
soon reached startling proportions. He had once more said 
the right word at the psychological moment, and formulated 
a great, practical, and necessary policy. Meeting after meet- 
ing was held in many parts of Ireland, and before long it 
was evident that Mr. Parnell was at the head of the mightiest 
popular movement since the days of O'Connell and 1845. 
Meantime, the Government and the English press looked on 
with sinister eye. The appeals of Mr. Parnell to the Irish 
farmers to protect themselves and their families and their 
homes against a gigantic danger found little sympathy even 
in a so-called Liberal press. Extracts from his speeches were 
quoted, by way of showing the desperate and the wicked 
character of the man ; but the context containing the argu- 
ments by which he justified his advice was carefully sup- 
pressed, and there was scarcely a word about the desperate 
circumstances of Ireland which so eloquently and convincingly 
pleaded for desperate remedies. The Government, on the 
other hand, arrested Mr. Davitt, Mr. Brennan, Mr. Kellen, 
and Mr. Day, of Castlebar ; but the case was not pressed with 
any particular vigour, and was finally abandoned. 

The idea of forming a central organisation for regulating 
and directing the growing movement in Ireland was formed 
in September 1879. The draft of an appeal for support for 
this organisation was prepared by Mr. Parnell, Mr. Brennan, 
and Mr. Davitt. On October 21, 1879, a meeting was held 
by circular in the Imperial Hotel, Lower O'Connell (then 
Sackville) Street; Mr. A. J. Kettle presided. The Land 
League was then and there founded. The following resolu- 
tions set forth the principles ot the new organisation : 

I. That the objects of the League are, first, to bring about a 



FAMINE AGAIN 309 

reduction of rack-rents ; second, to facilitate the obtaining of the 
ownership of the soil by the occupiers. 

II. That the objects of the League can be best attained (1) by 
promoting organisation among the tenant-farmers ; (2) by defending 
those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust 
rents ; (3) by facilitating the working of the Bright Clauses of the Land 
Act during the winter ; and (4) by obtaining such reform in the laws 
relating to land as will enable every tenant to become the owner of 
his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years. 

Mr. Parnell was elected president, and Mr. Kettle, Mr. 
Davitt, and Mr. Brennan were appointed honorary secre- 
taries. Mr. J. G. Biggar, M.P., Mr. W. H. O'Sullivan, M.P., 
and Mr. Patrick Egan were appointed treasurers, and a reso- 
lution was passed calling upon Mr. Parnell to go to America 
and obtain assistance. Mr. John Dillon was to accompany 
Mr. Parnell to America. 

This was the first time that the leader of a constitutional 
movement had gone among the Irish in America for the pur- 
pose of obtaining assistance for the people at home. Mr. 
Parnell's tour was a series of enthusiastic receptions. Wher- 
ever he went, and in nearly every town through which he 
passed, he addressed thousands of people. Officials of the 
United States attended and presided over his meetings, and 
at last he was paid the compliment of which only two 
other men — Kossuth and Dr. England — had been the re- 
cipients in the whole course of American history : he was 
permitted to address the House of Representatives at 
Washington. The financial results of this tour were extra- 
ordinarily large. The Land League, owing to the severity of 
the distress throughout the country, had resolved to devote a 
portion of their funds to the relief of the distress. The funds 
raised by Mr. Parnell were divided into two parts — one for 
the purpose of organisation, the other for the relief of distress. 
For both, about 72,000/. had been subscribed. 

The indirect effects of this tour were, perhaps, even more 
important. The reality of Irish distress could no longer be 
denied, and there grew up a competition between different 
sections as to which should most liberally contribute towards 
the movement for preventing famine. 



3io THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Thus, although Mr. Lowther as Chief Secretary had denied 
the existence of distress, the fact had been brought so clearly- 
home to the mind of the Lord Lieutenant, that his wife, the 
Duchess of Marlborough, issued an appeal, giving a dark 
picture of the state of the country, and formed a relief com- 
mittee. The Lord Mayor of Dublin for 1880 happened to 
be a man of great energy and ability — Mr. E. Dwyer Gray — 
and he also formed a committee of relief ; and thus, by the 
beginning of 1880, no fewer than three committees were work- 
ing to prevent the occurrence of famine. Thus the action of 
Mr. Parnell and the Land League had brought the condition 
of the country from the region of debate into that of admitted 
fact, notorious to all the nations of the world. 

Even Mr. Lowther and the Parliament were compelled at 
last to listen. Acknowledging the distress, they adopted a 
method for meeting it which is perhaps unexampled even 
in the history of the legislation of the House of Commons 
on the Irish Land question. While the landlords were 
scattering notices of eviction over the country wholesale, the 
Government conceived the felicitous idea that the landlords 
formed the most suitable agency for supplying relief to the 
tenants. Accordingly a Bill was introduced, the effect of which 
was to lend to the landlords the sum of 1,092,985/. without 
interest for two years, and at one per cent, interest afterwards ! 
This money was to be used by the landlords in giving employ- 
ment to their tenants, and in thus preventing the spread of- 
famine. With unconscious humour this extraordinary measure 
was called 'The Relief of Distress Act' 

Meantime, another great event affecting Ireland was about 
to happen. In March 1880 Lord Beaconsfield decided to 
dissolve Parliament. It is now known that the postponement 
of an appeal to the country to this late date was against his 
views, and that he was only overborne after a severe struggle. 
It was his idea that the time to ask for a renewal of the confi- 
dence of the country was when it was still in the full blaze of 
its frenzied and childish joy at the annexation of Cyprus and 
the return of the Prime Minister from Berlin as the herald of 
peace with honour. But that fortunate hour had been allowed 
to pass. The Afghan and Zulu difficulties had ensued ; Mr. 



FAMINE AGAIN 311 

Cross had brought in his Water Bill, and the prestige of the 
Government had sunk to a low ebb. Under such circum- 
stances the astute and utterly unscrupulous leader of the Tory- 
party saw that his only chance of success at the poll was to 
approach the people with some catching cry. The cry he chose 
was an anti-Irish manifesto. I will not stop in this place to 
examine into the morality of the statesman who, at the 
moment when Ireland was in the very agony of famine, did 
not scruple to arouse the fierce racial passions of the more 
powerful against the weaker nation ; still less am I tempted 
to point a moral against Tory statesmanship. What was the 
policy of Lord Beaconsfield in 1880 has become the policy 
of the Liberal party in 1SS5. They are now in the same 
want that he was then, and in default of any other ' cry,' 
appeal to the worst passions of Englishmen and Scotchmen 
with anti-Irish manifestoes. 

The news of the impending Dissolution reached Mr. 
Parnell on March 8, when he was speaking at Montreal. 
At once he saw that it was necessary for him to proceed to 
Ireland without one moment's delay. His lecture delivered, 
he started for New York. On the very morning of his de- 
parture he laid the foundation of a Land League in America, 
and on March 10 he sailed for home. He reached Queens- 
town on March 21, and thus he lost many valuable days. The 
Dissolution took place on March 24, and the first election in 
Ireland on April 1. The interval for a general electoral cam- 
paign was small indeed. However, the moment he landed in 
Ireland he proceeded to fight the election with an energy 
that seemed diabolic. He rushed from one part of the 
country to another, made innumerable speeches, had inter- 
views with most of the parliamentary candidates, himself 
stood for three constituencies. Throughout all this feverish 
struggle there was ever by his side, sharing, and often doing 
most of his work, the bright, fiercely industrious, sleeplessly 
active young secretary whom he had summoned to him in 
America. There was one stupendous difficulty, even greater 
than the shortness of time. At the very first meeting of the 
Land League this resolution had been passed : 

' That none of the funds of this League shall be used for the 



312 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

purchase of any landlord's interest or for furthering the interests of 
any parliamentary candidate.' 

The argument, I assume, in favour of this resolution was, 
that it was necessary to bend to the fierce distrust felt by 
some of the most ardent and energetic spirits of the country 
in parliamentary agitation : to them parliamentary agitation 
was still associated with the irrevocable memories of Keogh's 
treason and the long race of treacherous trimmers and self- 
seeking hypocrites. This view may have been sound, but 
the fact was, that of the thousands of pounds which were at 
the disposal of the Land League, either for purposes of relief 
or of organisation, every single penny had been subscribed 
under the influence of Mr. Parnell's name and in trust in his 
honour, his patriotism, and his methods. It is certain also 
that this resolution had the effect of seriously crippling Mr. 
Parnell's efforts. He fought the entire election with the sum 
of 1,250/. — 1,000/. which he obtained as a personal loan, 100/. 
sent from Liverpool, and 150/. which were obtained by his 
astute secretary from political opponents after a fashion not 
unamusing. 1 He was thus unable to put forward candidates 
for several constituencies in which his name would have en- 
sured success, and he was obliged to put up with the wrecks 
of broken faith and of falsified pledges which previous Par- 
liaments had laid high and dry on the political shore. Thus 
for Kerry, which would have returned two of his nominees, 
he had to be satisfied with the two Blennerhassetts. He went 
to Kildare, and had to accept from Mr. Meldon a promise 
which he knew might be true to the letter but would be false 
to the spirit. In some other constituencies he did not find 
time or opportunity to interfere at all. And in this way he 
and the constituencies and the Irish cause were deprived of 
many a man who might have swelled the ranks of those who 
fought throughout the memorable years between 1880 and 
1885. His toughest contest was in the city of Cork. For 
years that city had been represented by Mr. Nicholas 
D. Murphy, a characteristic specimen of the class of Catholic 
Whigs whose timidity and treachery have been one of the 
most potent agencies in the hands of English ministers for 

1 T. M. Healy in United Ireland, August 29, 18S5. 



FAMINE AGAIN 313 

prolonging the reign of Irish misery and of Irish servitude. 
When Mr. Parnell entered upon the contest it was everywhere 
regarded as a forlorn hope. The bishop and many of the 
priests of the diocese took an active and energetic part against 
him ; the shopkeepers were supposed to be still buried in the 
morass of Whiggery ; Mr. Murphy and his family were re- 
puted to be of great wealth, and certainly had large and far- 
reaching relations with the trading interests of the city. It 
was a great and bewildering surprise to the earnest Nationalists 
of the city when Mr. Parnell was found to have won. The 
result of the election was that there were sixty-eight men re- 
turned as Home Rulers. The deceptiveness of this total will 
be judged from the fact that among the Home Rulers were 
reckoned such men as Mr. J. Orrell Lever, returned as one of 
the members for Galway, and Mr. Whitworth, returned for 
Drogheda. Of the other Home Rulers the majority were 
reckoned supporters of Mr. Shaw, and but a small minority 
were openly pledged to follow Mr. Parnell ; a considerable 
number had not made a definite choice between the policies 
of the rival leaders. 

In England and Scotland, meantime, the General Election 
had resulted in an overwhelming triumph for the Liberal party 
and the return of Mr. Gladstone to power as the master of 
a great majority. The masses of the Irish people received 
the news of this victory with intense joy. The anti-Irish 
manifesto of Lord Beaconsfield had suggested the idea that 
the defeat of the Tories became the first duty of Irishmen 
everywhere. The leaders of the Home Rule Confederation 
in England and Scotland issued a manifesto calling upon the 
Irish electors in every English and Scotch constituency to go 
solid for the Liberal candidates. This advice the Irish electors 
had too well obeyed, and in every constituency marched in 
unbroken battalions to vote solidly Liberal. ' I went without 
my dinner," said a Poplar Irishman to me once at an anti- 
coercion meeting in Hyde Park, ' to vote for Mr. Bryce,and now 
Mr. Bryce is voting for coercion.' The Liberal candidates 
on their part showed themselves not ungrateful for this sup- 
port. Their addresses and speeches overflowed with words 
of sympathy and affection for Ireland, of denunciations of 



314 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Lord Beaconsfield and of his manifesto, and with solemn 
vows of eternal hostility to coercion. 

Mr. Parnell had been no party to this wholesale and 
blind adhesion of the Irish party to the English Liberals. 
His keen political instinct had already foreseen the circum- 
stances which would bring the interests of English Liberalism 
and of Irish Nationality into irreconcilable collision, and he 
would have preserved a policy which would have produced a 
more equal distribution of political power. Nor had he read 
the history of Ireland in vain. To him the most pregnant 
moral of that history had been that, whenever Irish Nation- 
alists had trusted the fortunes of their country to English 
Liberals, treachery, coercion, delayed or half-hearted reform 
had been the return. Most Irishmen would have mocked at 
these fears just then ; the English Liberal was regarded as 
Ireland's best friend ; and for the third time in the history of 
the epoch described in these pages, the Irish people placed 
their confidence in the honour and good-will, the pledges and 
principles, of the Liberal party. It will not be uninstructive 
to watch how this third experiment ended. 



[15 



CHAPTER X. 

THE LAND LEAGUE. 

The struggle between the two sections of the Home Rule 
party soon began. Without any consultation with Mr. 
Parnell a meeting of the new party was called for. Several 
of the new members refused to attend. A second meeting had 
to be convened, and this took place at the City Hall, Dublin, 
on May 17. On this occasion nearly every one of the new 
men who had been returned to support Mr. Parnell was 
present. To the general world they were unknown, obscure, 
and to some extent despised ; and many of them were young. 
But there was scarcely one of them whose previous career had 
not been a preparation for the position which he now held, 
and who had not been living a life either of action or of 
thought to which membership of a party led by such a leader 
as Mr. Parnell was an appropriate climax. Amid their varied 
characters they all possessed something alike in a certain dash 
of fanaticism. Mr. Justin McCarthy had been elected before. 
Almost from his entry into the House of Commons he had 
drifted towards the side of Mr. Parnell. Some surprise was felt 
when he consented to stand and be elected as an Irish member. 
When he took his seat for the first time in the House -of 
Commons Mr. John Bright congratulated Parliament on the 
accession to its ranks, and Parliament cheered in cordial 
agreement. But there was some little regret that it had not 
fallen to his lot to be the member for a British instead of an 
Irish constituency ; probably there was more than one city in 
England or Scotland that would have felt honoured by such 
a representative as the author of the ' History of Our Own 
Times,' and there certainly would in time have been a Liberal 
Administration that would have been glad to have counted 
him among its members. Even many Irishmen at the start 



316 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of Justin McCarthy's career may have felt that he would 
have taken his place in the ranks of an English Liberal 
Government as appropriately as in those of an Irish National 
Party. And yet Justin McCarthy had a past of which but few 
people knew ; but to those who knew that past, its most com- 
plete and fitting sequel was that McCarthy should be one of 
the leaders of the first really independent party in the British 
Parliament. 

Justin McCarthy was born in Cork in 1830. When he 
was a boy the capital of Munster could lay claim to really 
deserve the traditional reputation of the province for learn- 
ing. Mr. McCarthy's father was one of the best classical 
scholars of the day, and there was at that time a school- 
master named Goulding — the name is familiar to many a 
Corkman still — who was a really fine scholar. Justin 
McCarthy was one of Goulding's pupils, and when he left 
school he had the not common power even among hard 
students of being able to read Greek fluently and to write 
as well as translate Latin with complete ease. Journalism 
appeared to him the readiest form of making a livelihood, 
and, like so many other literary men, he began at one of the 
low rungs of the ladder. He had taught himself shorthand, 
and his first employment was that of a reporter on the Cork 
Examiner. It may be an interesting fact to note that his 
hand still retains its cunning, and that he may often be 
observed taking down on the margin of the Parliamentary 
Order Paper the exact words of some important Ministerial 
statement for quotation in his leading article. The first 
important piece of work, it may also here be mentioned, 
which Mr. McCarthy was sent to do was to report the trials of 
Smith O'Brien and his colleagues at Clonmel. There are two 
other important reminiscences of Mr. McCarthy's reporting 
days. He was present at the meeting in Cork at which the 
late Judge Keogh swore that oath which played so tragic 
a part in Irish history ; and he was also present, as has been 
seen, at the famous dinner at which the present Lord Fitz- 
gerald, then a rising young lawyer, in the ardour and viru- 
lence of his patriotism, bearded a lord-lieutenant and 
scandalised an audience of Cork's choicest Whigs. It was in 



THE LAND LEAGUE 317 

1847 that Mr. McCarthy started his professional life, and 
everybody knows that all that was young, enthusiastic, and 
earnest in Cork shared the political aspirations of that stormy 
time. There had been in existence for many years a de- 
bating society known as the ' Scientific and Literary Society,' 
and one of the many forms in which the new spirit roused by 
Young Ireland showed itself was the starting of that body 
known as the Cork Historical Society, as a rival to the older 
and tamer association. Among the members of this body 
.were many young fellows who afterwards rose to importance. 
Sir John Pope Hennessy, now Governor of the Mauritius,* 
and Justin McCarthy himself were among its first recruits. 
The Historical Society became a recruiting ground for Young 
Ireland ; nearly all its members joined the party of combat, 
and they founded one of the many Confederate Clubs that 
were started to prepare for the coming struggle. 

President Grevy in his sober age remembers the day when 
he mounted a barricade. Similarly Justin McCarthy, in his 
maturity of philosophic calm, can look back to a time when 
he dreamed of rifles and bayonet charges and death in the 
midst of fierce fight for the cause of Ireland. To those who 
know him there is no difference in the man of to-day and the 
man of '48. He has still the same unflinching courage as 
then. In this respect, indeed, Justin McCarthy is a singular 
mixture of apparent incompatibilities. There is no man who 
enjoys the hour more keenly. He has the capacity of M. Renan 
for finding the life around him amusing ; enjoys society and 
solitude, work and play, a choice dinner or an all-night sitting. 
But he has eminently ' a two o'clock in the morning courage ' — 
a readiness to face the worst without notice. With his fifty- 
five years he is still a man of sanguine temperament ; but in 
'48 he was only eighteen. He naturally, therefore, belonged 
to the section which had Mitchel for its apostle, and open 
and immediate insurrection for its gospel. Mitchel was 
arrested, and no attempt was made to rescue him ; and there 
were many among the companions of McCarthy who saw in 
this failure the death of their hopes, the end of their efforts 
for the Irish cause. Justin McCarthy was not one of those. 
Let the remainder of this portion of his life be told in the 
words of his son : — 



318 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

There were young men in that city by the Lee who did not think, 
even because the men of '48 had made no attempt to rescue John 
Mitchel from his sentence, that therefore the fires of patriotism were 
necessarily extinguished upon the altars of liberty : '48 had failed, 
but there was no reason why '49 should fail. In this very year, 
when the English Queen was in Dublin listening to the loyal protests 
of loyal citizens, and while she was being assured by the Orange 
clique that the Young Ireland movement meant nothing, and that 
Ireland was heart and soul devoted to her service and to English 
rule, in that year a young man came down on a special visit from 
Dublin to Cork. The young man bore a name which is deservedly 
dear to Irishmen— Joseph Brennan, better known to his friends, and 
better known to us to-day, as Joe Brennan. Those who knew Joe 
Brennan are not likely to forget his wonderful dark eyes, his brilliant 
talk, and, what was better than either, one of the most National hearts 
that ever beat for Ireland. Joe Brennan was a young Corkman who 
had gone to Dublin and become a writer on Mitchel's paper, and who, 
when Mitchel was exiled, had started a paper of his own. He came 
down to Cork with the deliberate purpose of trying if he could not 
do something to stir into blaze again the revolutionary fires which 
seemed to have been extinguished when Meagher and O'Doherty, 
and Smith O'Brien and the others were sentenced to transporta- 
tion. . . . Brennan . . . entered into negotiations with two men, 
both young men about his own age. One of them is a member of 
the present Irish Parliamentary party, and his name is not altogether 
unknown in literature. The other is now the editor of the most 
influential paper in the South of Ireland. . . . Joe Brennan's plan was 
simple and not unpractical ; and, of course, his purpose was revolu- 
tionary. He had no great hope of a successful revolution. His idea 
was that a number of small risings should take place on the very 
same day, hour, and minute, in different parts of Ireland ; that 
their suddenness and unanimity might serve to distract authority ; 
that at least there would be a struggle ; that some brave men would 
die for Ireland ; and that something good for the country must 
happen out of that. ' Who knows but the world may end to-night ? ' 
says the lover in Browning's poem. Something of the same desperate 
mood seemed to possess Joe Brennan's men at that time. Let it at 
least be shown to English dominion that there were young men in 

Ireland ready to die for their country, and then ? Well, the world 

might end, or the English rule might grow humane, or any other 
strange and exceedingly unlikely thing might come to pass. It was 
the dream of a young man ; and Joe Brennan was a young man, and 



THE LAND LEAGUE 319 

his friends were all young men— many of them very young men. . . . 
Soon in Cork alone there were a very large number of generous, 
high-souled, pure-hearted young men, whose one dream, hope, and 
ambition was to give their lives for the sake of their country. . . . They 
had plenty of arms, to begin with. There were few young men in 
Cork in 1848 who could not boast the possession of a rifle, or a 4 
sabre, or a pike ; and when 1848 failed, these rifles and sabres and 
pikes were hidden away in all sorts of unlikely places — buried in 
back-gardens, or stored away in unsuspicious-looking barrels, or put 
out of sight, if not out of mind, somehow. . . . They did not hope of 
themselves to win the freedom of Ireland. They only hoped to 
make a series of desperate efforts, to die gallantly, and by their brave 
deaths to stimulate the national feeling of their country, and to con- 
vince the oppressor of their earnestness of purpose and of their 
hatred of his rule. ... It was the duty of every one of Joe Brennan's 
friends to swear in as many recruits as he could, and to get these 
recruits to bring in others to swell the total of insurrection. There 
were incessant nightly drillings in out-of-the-way places. There 
were incessant meetings of the revolutionary leaders and of their 
followers, organised under the pretence of temperance meetings, 
literary associations, and the like. One spot in especial was a 
favourite place for secret drillings-^-the place known as Cork Park 
in the region where the Cork and Bandon railway is — then slob land. 
Here there were continual drillings, where the great object was to 
get large bodies of men to obey readily the word of command, and to 
go through military evolutions swiftly and silently. Here, too, it 
was a great advantage that if at any time unwelcome persons — police 
or others — did make their appearance, any body of men could imme- 
diately and easily disperse, and be lost to sight in a few moments. . . . 
They had their passwords, of course — their signs and countersigns. 
If one recruit met another, and wished to be certain of his comrade- 
ship and brotherhood, he began by asking him, ' What's the news ? ' 
If the other were one of the league, he immediately made answer, 
' The harvest is coming ! ' If this answer were not quite sufficient 
— if it seemed an answer that might possibly have been made by 
chance by some uninitiated one, for the harvest zvas near — he spoke 
again, interrogating thus : 'How are we to reap it?' If the man 
thus interrogated answered, ' We'll reap it with steel,' he was at once 
recognised as being of the company of the chosen. 

What Joe Brennan was doing in Cork John O'Leary was engaged 
upon elsewhere, and other men were working in other parts of Ireland. 
. . . When one rising has failed, it is very difficult to rouse popular 



320 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

passions to the fever heat of another insurrection. Still, with all these 
difficulties in the way, the young men of the new movement were 
determined to go on, . . . and made ready for the signal which was to 
come to them, and which was to be the match which would fire the 
flames of rebellion in many parts of the country at the same 
moment. Unfortunately the signal was not properly given. It 
reached some places and not others. The insurrection did not 
break out simultaneously. There were one or two abortive risings 
in different parts of the country. Joe Brennan did his part of the 
business. He rose at Cappoquin. He led his little body of insur- 
gents to take the police barrack there. The police were prepared for 
their coming. There was a sharp, short exchange of shots, and then Joe 
Brennan saw that this thing was hopeless. His men dispersed. He 
himself threw away his revolver, and walked quietly from the scene of 
action and got into hiding, later on making good his escape to America. 
That was the end of insurrection for a time. The little centres 
of conspiracy, that had been waiting for the watchword that was to 
hurl them into action, heard with despair of the disaster at Cappoquin 
and the failure of their hopes. There was nothing further to be done 
for the moment. . . . Joe Brennan's future career is familiar to all 
Irishmen. He made his way to America — to New Orleans. There, 
in that wonderful city on the Mississippi, which is still a marvellous 
combination of France before the Revolution, of tropical Creole life, 
and of modern American enterprise, and which was then still more 
striking and vivid in its contrast than it now is, he founded a news- 
paper, and married — but not the love of his youth, not ' Mary ' of 
the ' Nation.' She died unmarried. Blindness came upon him, and 
he wrote some melancholy, beautiful verses upon the calamity which 
darkened his life. That was not long. He died while he was still 
vvhat may be called a young man. 1 

With this episode ended for the moment Justin McCarthy's 
political history, and from this period, for many years, his 
story is that of the literary man. That story is not one of 
success gained rapidly or without very severe work. It was 
in the year 185 1 that Mr. McCarthy first tried his fortunes in 
London. The attempt ended in failure, and he had to return 
to the reporter's place in Cork. Not long after this he met 
with his first piece of luck. There was at that time a Royal 
Commission for inquiring into the fairs and markets of Ire- 
land, and the secretary having broken down, Justin McCarthy 

1 United Ireland. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 321 

was taken on as the official shorthand writer. His aptitude 
was such that some member of the Commission urged him to 
again go to London, and armed him with letters of introduc- 
tion to persons of influence. This was in 1.852. McCarthy 
again tried his chance, and went to the ' Times ' and other 
offices, but without success. Before he could continue this 
fruitless labour he heard of the ' Northern Times,' the firsi 
provincial daily of England, which was just about to be 
started in Liverpool, applied for a situation, and was accepted. 

But he was still only a reporter, and even he himself did 
not yet very well know whether he was fitted for better 
things. It is one of the sad experiences of those who have 
to begin low down in a profession that their upward progress 
is often much slower than that of those who have been able 
to start from a higher grade, or who have not even started at 
all. The ballet girl may be a tragedienne of genius, but she 
probably finds it more difficult to convince the manager of 
that than the amateur with influential friends ; and in the 
same way the presumption always is that the journalist who 
begins as a reporter should be allowed so to continue. But 
with that persistent, though — so to speak — invisible energy 
which is characteristic of Justin McCarthy, he worked on, 
gave literary lectures, and in the end was allowed the privi- 
lege of contributing to the editorial columns. He remained 
in Liverpool till i860; in that year the 'Northern Times,' 
pressed hard by more daring rivals, failed. McCarthy was 
contended for by several Liverpool journals, but he declined all, 
fixed in the resolve to make or mar his fortune in London. 

At this time the young journalist had a counsellor who 
for many years was the chief arbiter of his destiny in all the 
crises of his life. Before he had left Cork he had seen, but he 
had never spoken to, Miss Charlotte Allman, a member of the 
well-known Munster family, and, in the meantime, Miss 
Allman had come to reside with her brother in Liverpool. 
The two young people resolved to marry, in spite of the 
strong opposition of relatives and in face of the frowning 
fortunes of a young, a badly paid, and as yet unknown jour- 
nalist ; and in 1855 they were married in the town of Maccles- 
field. The folly of these young people was more truly wise 



3 22 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

than the sagacity of their elders, for their marriage was to 
both the best and the most beneficent event in their lives. 
To those who knew Mrs. McCarthy there is no need to dilate 
on the resistless charm of her truly beautiful nature. To her 
husband she was the mainspring of his life. She never wrote 
a line ; she did not even pretend to any literary power ; but 
she had the keen intelligence of sympathy : she had faith in 
her husband, and she had indomitable courage. It was she 
that induced Mr. McCarthy to refuse all the Liverpool offers, 
and that turned his face steadily to the larger hopes of 
London ; and how much hopefulness it required to urge this 
course will be seen from the fact that the joint capital of the 
young couple when they landed in London was 10/. Of that 
they spent more than i/. in buying an olive or some other 
sprout, which was planted with lofty hopes in the garden of 
their new hoube in Battersea, and which, of course, perished 
after a short and sickly existence. 

Mr. McCarthy's first engagement in London was as a 
Parliamentary reporter on the ' Morning Star.' He found 
time to do other work in the intervals of this hard occupa- 
tion, and, mainly through the persuasions of his wife, tried his 
hand at an essay for one of the big magazines. He had 
taught himself French, German, and Italian ; was familiar 
with the three literatures ; and his first attempt at essay- 
writing had Schiller for its subject. He next tried the 
' Westminster Review,' and two articles of his in that period- 
ical suggested views so novel, and at the same time so 
correct, that they attracted the attention of John Stuart Milk 
The philosopher was introduced to the- young writer, showed 
a friendly interest in his welfare, and helped to advance his 
fortunes. Promotion at last began to come rapidly. In 
the autumn of i860 he was appointed foreign editor of the 
'Morning Star,' and in 1865 he became editor-in-chief. 
Those who remember the journal and the times when it lived 
will know what splendid service it did to the cause of Ireland,, 
which at that period seemed terribly hopeless indeed ; and 
its tone of energetic and even fierce advocacy of Irish national 
claims was, of course, largely due to the inspiration of the 
ardent Irishman who was then at its head. It was while he 



THE LAND LEAGUE 323 

was in this position that Mr. McCarthy became intimately 
acquainted with Mr. John Bright. In these days the ex- 
Minister was still the great tribune in the eyes of his admirers, 
and the mere blatant demagogue in the mouths of his oppo- 
nents. He was fond of spending some hours in the office of 
the ' Star,' in which his sister — the widow of Samuel Lucas, 
who was brother of the Frederick Lucas of Irish history — had 
some shares ; and many an hour did the editor and the poli- 
tician spend together in discussing the oratorical exploits of 
Mr. Gladstone, the thing that did duty for a conscience in 
Mr. Disraeli, or the comparative merits of Shakespeare and 
Milton. It is one of the unpleasant consequences of the 
fierce struggles of the last few years that those two old friends 
have ceased even to speak to one another. But in 1868, 
when it became clear that Mr. Bright was going to become a 
Minister, and when he sold out his share in the ' Morning 
Star,' Mr. McCarthy lost all desire to be further connected 
with the journal, and resigned his position. 

He then entered on a completely new and a highly in- 
teresting experience. He went to America. His reputation 
had gone before him, and he found an embarrassing choice of 
offers awaiting him. He had, while still editor of the ' Star,' 
published his first novel, ' Paul Massey ' (this appeared in 
1866) — a story written after the sensational fashion of that 
hour, which Mr. McCarthy has since suppressed. This had 
been followed, in 1867, by the 'Waterdale Neighbours' — a 
charming story. One of Mr. McCarthy's first engagements 
was to write a series of stories for the ' Galaxy,' then perhaps 
the chief literary magazine in America. He was also asked 
to lecture, and partly because the terms were extremely 
remunerative, and partly out of a desire to see the country, 
he consented. The result is that Mr. McCarthy has, seen 
more of America than almost any European, and than nine- 
tenths of Americans. America has changed greatly since 
the Irish lecturer went on his first tour, for at that period 
the Pacific Railway had but just been completed, and 
the Red Indians used still to haunt the depots in numbers 
sufficiently large to be sometimes dangerous, and camp fires 
along the line, around which soldiers gathered, reminded the 



324 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

traveller how recent had been the conquest over barbarism. 
Mr. McCarthy was an extremely successful lecturer, and 
between his pen and his. tongue found the United States the 
El Dorado it has proved to so many from the old world. He 
paid a brief visit to London in the middle of 1870, returned 
again in the autumn of that year, and finally in the autumn 
of 1 87 1 came back to England for good. 

His name meantime had been kept steadily before the 
English reading public. In 1869 'My Enemy's Daughter,' 
which had been written nearly ten years before, ran through 
' Belgravia,' then under the management of Miss Braddon. 
Immediately after his return Mr. McCarthy was offered, and 
accepted, an engagement on the ' Daily News' as Parliamentary 
leader writer. For years he was one of the best known 
figures in the Reporters' Gallery, and was looked up to by 
most of his editorial colleagues, as the man who took the 
most rapid and the most accurate view of a Parliamentary 
situation, and as having the most sagacious head of the 
political writers of his time. The work of a Parliamentary 
leader writer is by no means easy. He has to keep the 
abominable hours of the House of Commons ; he has to 
watch for hours before he can put a pen to paper, and up to 
a recent period — and possibly still— he had to get through 
his task under circumstances of savage inconvenience. But 
Mr. McCarthy has a singularly robust and well-balanced 
physique, and every night between four and five his spectacled 
and tranquilly philosophic face might be seen in Palace Yard 
with a regularity that successive Premiers strove after, but 
never attained. His literary fortunes, meantime, steadily ad- 
vanced ; and in ' Dear Lady Disdain ' he wrote a novel which 
everybody talked about, and upon which there was a real run. 
With the versatility which is so singular he soon after devoted 
himself to another and a very different kind of work, under- 
taking a contemporary chronicle, under the title, 'The History 
of Our Own Times,' the first two volumes of which were 
published in 1878. Everybody knows the result. The book 
— to quote the hackneyed expression — took the town by 
storm. It was praised with equal fervour by Conservative 
and by Liberal critics ; its style was as much an object of 



THE LAND LEAGUE 325 

eulogy as its tone and its temper. It was, indeed, a model of 
what contemporary history should be. Equal justice was 
dealt out to all parties ; the portraits of men were clear-cut 
and sympathetic, and the style was evenly melodious without 
one single attempt at rhetoric, without one phrase or one 
passage that could be called pretentious. The book sold 
with enormous rapidity, and edition followed edition in rapid 
succession. Great as was its success on this side of the 
water, it was still greater in America. Rival publishers 
brought out rival editions, and the present writer never re- 
members to have gone on any journey in America without 
seeing a copy of the ' History of Our Own Times ' in the hands 
of several of the passengers. But the hapless author gained 
little from this enormous American sale, for as yet there is no 
copyright between England and America. His old publishers, 
the Messrs. Harper Brothers, with that fair dealing which 
characterises all their transactions, did send him voluntarily 
an occasional instalment of a hundred pounds or so, but they 
at the same time told him that if there had been an inter- 
national copyright they could have well afforded to have given 
him 10,000/. for his rights. It may be interesting to note 
that Mr. McCarthy's profits from the book up to the present 
have been 6,000/. 

Little has been said cf Mr. McCarthy's modern political 
career. The member for Longford is one of the men who 
does not owe Mr. Parnell anything — as the Irish leader would 
himself be the first to acknowledge— but Mr. McCarthy soon 
saw that in Mr. Parnell there was the real chief of that honest 
and independent Parliamentary party for which, like so many 
of the old '48 men, he had been vainly looking upwards of 
thirty years ; to Mr. Parnell then he unreservedly gave his con- 
fidence and his support. Sagacious, tranquil, and experienced, 
he was thrown into a prominent position at an epoch of fierce 
and tempestuous passions ; but nobody was readier to see, 
when the time came, the necessity for strong action. Occa- 
sionally he differed from the counsels of younger and less- 
trained men, and there are few of these colleagues of his who 
can look back upon those occasions when they ventured to 
differ from their wise counsellor without certain twinges and 



326 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

misgivings. But whatever might be his views in the privacy 

of the council chamber, Mr. McCarthy always stood by the 

rule, which with him has been thought out till it has become 

a profound conviction— the rule that, in the face of the enemy, 

the Irish party -should be a unit. He has been ready on every 

emergency to take his share of the unspeakable drudgery to 

which Irish members have been subjected during the last few 

years ; and it imposed a greater sacrifice on him than on any 

other member of the Irish party to face the odium and the 

loss of personal and professional prestige which a part in these 

unpopular labours involved. If the delivery of Mr. McCarthy 

were equal to his intellectual and rhetorical powers, he would 

be amongst the foremost speakers of the House. He is ready ; 

he has eminently clearness of head and calmness of temper; 

and his ideas clothe themselves in language of beauty, 

smoothness, and appropriateness with an unerring regularity 

which belongs to but two other speakers in the House — 

Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sexton. He has in more than one 

debate delivered the best speech in point of matter and of 

form. His was the best speech in the strange debate which 

occurred on Mr. O'Donnell's suspension for his attacks on 

M. Challemel-Lacour, and his was the most effective of the 

many effective replies given to Mr. Forster's historic attack 

on Mr. Parnell. Mr. McCarthy in one style of speech is far 

and away superior to any of his party, and probably to any 

man in the House — that is, as an after-dinner speaker. He 

bubbles over with wit of the most delicate and playful kind, 

and can literally keep the table, if not in a roar, at least ' on 

the smile' — to use the expressive Americanism. 

Finally, let this sketch of Mr. McCarthy's career be closed 
with the mention of the saddest and darkest page of his life. 
Just as his long struggle was- crowned with success, and as he 
became from the poor and obscure reporter the popular 
novelist, the successful historian, and the member of Parlia- 
ment, the woman without whom he would have remained, in 
all probability, poor and obscure to the end, was seized with a 
lingering illness and died. It would be unbecoming to even 
attempt a description of what this loss meant to Mr. McCarthy. 
He has one daughter and one son. They share the political 



THE LAND LEAGUE 327 

opinions of their father, and, indeed, of their mother, who was 
a fierce Nationalist. 

Few can paint a character completely, and it is acquaint- 
ance only with the member for Longford that can make 
intelligible the peculiarly strong hold he has over the affec- 
tions and admiration of his intimates. It is not often that 
there arc found united in the same man modesty and literary 
genius, a toleration of others with a power of absolute self- 
abnegation, a sane enjoyment of every hour, with the courage 
of calmly facing, for the sake of the right cause, Fortune's 
worst blows, Destiny's most cruel decree. Moderate in advice, 
when the fortunes of his country are at stake, he is always 
boldest when acts involve only personal risk to himself. It 
is this curious mixture of tenderness, shyness, and almost 
feminine romanticism with a thoroughly masculine and fearless 
spirit, that make him so beloved. There is something in- 
complete, says the French epigram, in the noble life that 
docs not end on the scaffold, in the prison, or on the field of 
battle. May Justin McCarthy have many and prosperous 
days, and a tranquil and honourable end ! But it is almost 
a pity that he cannot be hanged for high treason, to show how 
calmly a quiet man can die for Ireland. 

In the debates of the meeting in the City Hall, Mr. 
Thomas Sexton broke silence for only a few minutes. 
Nobody could help remarking that his voice was peculiarly 
melodious ; but few had any conception of the great things 
that were in this thin, delicate, rather retiring man. 

Thomas Sexton was born in Waterford in 1848. Most 
of his colleagues have had to begin the struggle of life at an 
early age, but few even of them faced the world a so early 
a period as Sexton. He had not yet reached his thirteenth 
birthday when he entered a competition for a clerkship in 
the secretary's office of the Waterford and Limerick Company. 
The post was naturally unimportant ; the salary, of course, 
small ; but that did not prevent thirty youths entering the 
lists. Of these Sexton was the youngest, and Sexton ob- 
tained the first place. Lie remained in the secretary's office 
till he was between twenty and twenty-one years of age, 



328 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

when, as will be seen, he left his native town, drawn to the 
metropolis, like most young men of ability and enterprise. 

The influence of his many years of dry toil in an office is 
visible in Sexton to-day. It has often been remarked that he 
has what is considered an un-Irish talent of dealing readily, 
clearly, and accurately with figures. This is no new talent. 
When he was in the railway office in Waterford his friends 
used to amuse themselves by giving him a long sum in com- 
pound addition, which most people would find it hard to 
calculate rapidly even with the aid of pen and ink. Sexton 
would close his eyes, and in a few minutes would give the 
answer with invariable accuracy. He used to say that the 
figures were ' written on his brain.' Mr. Trevelyan once 
brought in a "Rill to increase official pay ; and, speaking 
within a few minutes after the Chief Secretary had con- 
cluded, Sexton was able to tell, almost to a penny, what 
the sum- total meant to each individual, and was compli- 
mented by Mr. Trevelyan on his accuracy. But Sexton 
had another life besides that of the railway official. In his 
boyhood's days there was still a good deal of literary and 
social activity in the Irish provincial towns. These were 
the days of Mechanics' Institutes and of the Catholic Young 
Men's Societies — things that now in most Irish towns are but 
recollections, vanished under the universal miasma that has 
killed alike the things of industry and the things of joy. 
The sight of the silent mill, the unroofed cottage, the rotting 
boat, the disappearance of the peasant of Meath, the artizan 
of Dublin, the fisherman of Claddagh or of Bantry Bay, 
bring the advancing desolation of Ireland no more clearly 
home to the mind than' the departure of the boisterous whirl 
of the hurling match, of the wild gaiety of the ' pattern,' and 
of the literary and other societies in which the people of the 
Irish towns used in happier days to meet, and amuse and 
teach each other. Though Sexton and most of his com- 
panions in arms are still young, they can look back on a 
comparative change in Ireland in this regard. They can 
remember the time when, on Sunday evenings at least, there 
was no difficulty about knowing where the hours could be 
passed pleasantly and usefully, and where the beginning 



THE LAND LEAGUE 329 

could be made of acquaintance with poetry, history, with the 
arts of oratory and of elocution, and sometimes even the 
gentler but equally necessary arts of singing and dancing. 

Though, as will be seen by-and-by, it was a long time 
before Sexton discovered the real strength of his abilities or 
his true place in life, there can be little doubt that he might 
never have become the man he is to-day if he had not been 
a member of a Catholic Young Men's Association and a 
Mechanics' Institute in Waterford when he was a boy. The 
Young Men's Society he joined when he was fourteen, and 
before long he had gained an audience which admired and 
believed in him. When he was about sixteen he delivered a 
lecture on Oliver Goldsmith, and another on John Banim, the 
novelist. The prominence to which his talents entitled him 
was recognised in his election as honorary secretary of the 
society. He showed some anticipation of his own future posi- 
tion by promoting the formation of a debating club within the 
society, and was, of course, one of the most frequent com- 
batants in the dialectical duels of this body. He was finally 
elected president of the club, and he held this position up to 
the time of his leaving Waterford. He had meantime been 
an active member of another organisation, and had been 
employed in pretty much the same way. He joined the 
Mechanics' Institute when he was about fifteen. The 
Mechanics' Institute in Waterford, as in other Irish towns,, 
was not confined to the class for whose benefit such bodies 
were supposed mainly to exist, for among its members were- 
the professional men and merchants of the city. Here also^ 
Sexton's mind naturally turned to the idea of a debating; 
club, and with his co-operation such a club was started. 
The new debating society became in time one of the pro- 
minent features in the life of Waterford. It gave public 
readings and debates in the Town Hall, and it may be worth 
recalling that on one occasion there was a debate between 
two members of the Institute, of whom Sexton was one, and 
two members of the Portlaw Debating Society. The subject 
of discussion was whether emigration was beneficial to Ire- 
land. Sexton was elected a member of the committee of the 
Institute, and afterwards was appointed secretary, a position 



35o the parnell movement 

which, like that of the presidency of the debating" club of the 
Catholic Young" Men's Society, and the secretaryship of that 
society itself, he held until his departure from Waterford. 

Meantime Sexton's ideas had been straying towards 
Dublin, and the chances of there making a livelihood by 
work more suitable to his tastes than that of the railway 
office. He had plenty of friends who were ready to echo the 
whispers in his own heart that he had within him the 
makings of great things ; and when he was twenty-one he at 
last determined to make a bid for better fortunes. It speaks 
well, not merely for Sexton's own power of personal influence, 
but also for the keenness of appreciation in the Waterford 
people, that even at that early period in his career the de- 
parture of Sexton from his native city should have been 
regarded as an event of some importance. A public dinner 
was held in honour of the departing young citizen, and 
addresses were presented to him by the Young Men's Society 
and the Debating Club. Sexton had become the centre of 
a group of able young Waterford men, of whom two, at 
least, have since achieved a position of importance — Edmund 
Leamy, now M.P, for Cork county, and Richard Dowling, 
the well-known novelist : most of them, in happier times and 
in another land, would probably have added to the glory and 
happiness of their country. Sexton went to Dublin with all 
kinds of good wishes, and with the strongest encouragement 
from friends who had faith in his future. This was in 1869, 
when Sexton was in his twenty-first year. His start in the 
Irish capital was good, for he immediately obtained a perma- 
nent post as a leader-writer in the ' Nation ' office from 
A. M. Sullivan, who was at that time the editor. He con- 
tributed regularly his leading articles every week to the 
National journal, and when Mr. D. B. Sullivan went to the 
Irish Bar, he took up, besides, the editorship of the ' Weekly 
News.' He was for a while also the editor of ' Young Ireland ' 
— a literary weekly which is published from the ' Nation ' office. 

While he was thus busy with his pen Sexton took prac- 
tically no* part whatever in politics, and had done little 
to justify those promises of oratorical eminence which had 
been given by his boyish exploits in the debating societies 



THE LAND LEAGUE 331 

of Waterford. Indeed, from 1869 to 1878 it would probably 
not be easy to find a single speech or even a remark of 
Sexton's reported in the newspapers. However, when the 
Home Rule League was formed, he had given public proof 
of the faith that was in him by joining its ranks, and he was 
elected a member of its council. In 1879 came Sexton's 
first appearance on a public arena in Irish politics. In that 
year he was requested by the council of the Land League 
to attend as their delegate at a county meeting at Dromore 
West, county Sligo. The people of the county which he 
represents were, to their credit, quick to discern the abilities 
of the then unknown young man, and he made, from his 
very first appearance among them, a profound impression. 
Indeed, even after he was elected, Sexton was known by 
Sligo long before he was recognised by Ireland generally. 
When the general election came it seemed very doubtful 
whether Sexton would be one of those chosen to represent 
Irish demands in the House of Commons. There were few 
then who had the least conception of what his powers really 
were. He was simply a writer in the ' Nation ' — a clever 
fellow enough, of course, in his way— able to write a pretty 
article or a nice little story, but beyond that, nothing in 
particular. It might be desirable, perhaps, that he should be 
run — first, because good candidates were so hard to get; 
and, secondly, because his long training in the ' Nation ' 
office was some security that he had the right opinions and 
would vote the right way. There can be no harm in recalling 
these disparaging estimates at a moment when Sexton has 
established a position so great in the councils of his party 
and in the esteem of the whole Irish race ; and they serve to 
show how little Sexton owes his rank to any efforts to make 
the most of himself or push himself into notice. His name 
was mentioned for the county Waterford, but withdrawn ; 
immediately after it having been resolved that he should 
be run for the county Sligo. It is, perhaps, no breach of 
confidence to reveal the fact that one of the first to dis- 
cern the commanding abilities of Sexton was Mr. Healy, and 
that the present member for South Derry was one of those 
who urgently and constantly pressed the claims of his friend 



332 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

— and in the position which Mr. Healy then held as secretary 
to Mr. Parnell he was indeed a powerful ally. When at last 
Sexton was sent to Sligo his difficulties were not at an end. 
It would be amusing, and perhaps even a little painful, to recall 
the rigid inquisition through which he had to pass before he 
was able to obtain promises of support among certain sections 
of the electorate ; it was, indeed, considered at that time so 
great a concession that a Sexton should be allowed to oppose 
a King-Harman ! These petty obstacles, however, did not 
come from the masses of the people, many of whom had 
already, as has been indicated, begun to appreciate the real 
worth of the man with whom they had to deal. The canvass 
which he made through the county confirmed the impression, 
and the unknown young writer from the ' Nation ' office was 
elected at the head of the poll, above both the Whig and the 
Tory magnates who had previously sat for the county. 

Sexton was at last a member of Parliament, and for the 
first time was in the arena where his abilities had the oppor- 
tunity of asserting themselves. But even in this position, 
recognition came to him slowly. The present writer, who 
was personally unacquainted with Mr. Sexton at the time of 
the general election, heard him for the first time at the meet- 
ing of the Irish members in the City Hall, and though Mr. 
Sexton spoke but a few words, was immediately struck by 
him as one who had the true oratorical nature, and 'Mr. T. D. 
Sullivan — it should be added — had already so accurately 
gauged the new member for Sligo as to prophesy that he — 
with one or two others — would be the orators of the Irish 
party. But Sexton seemed in no hurry to justify these anti- 
cipations. During his first session of Parliament he remained, 
comparatively speaking, unnoticed. It was seen that he was 
phenomenally constant in attendance, that at almost any 
hour of the day or night he was to be found in that first seat 
on the third bench below the gangway which he had marked 
for his own, and that he was in the habit of putting what, in 
these early days of the new Irish party, was considered a 
very large number of questions. But nobody yet had any 
idea that there was anything in him above very earnest and 
very respectable mediocrity, nor during the recess which 



THE LAND LEAGUE 333 

followed did he advance his position to any appreciable 
degree. He was certainly one of the most constant among 
the speakers at the Land League meetings throughout the 
country ; but this fact, while it procured him the notice of the 
Government so far that he was included in the famous trial of 
the traversers, did not have any very perceptible effect upon 
his own political fortunes. It was on an evening when Mr. 
Forster's Coercion Bill was under discussion that Sexton 
broke upon the House for the first time as a great orator. 
It will be seen later on that Mr. Forster did not produce the 
Blue Book in which there were the statistics of increased 
crime, that begot coercion, until weeks after he had com- 
mitted the Government to coercion, and days after he had 
introduced his bill into the House of Commons. It was 
in the dissection of the extraordinary details which appeared 
in the famous Blue Book, at last produced, that Sexton 
showed his powers. The House was, when he rose, but ill- 
prepared, indeed, for such a speech, especially from an Irish 
member; for of the subject it was already sick to death ; and 
the final outcome was as predestined as the procession of the 
earth through the regions of the air. If the writer, too, re- 
members rightly, the physical circumstances of the moment 
tended to increase the prevalent depression, for it was a dull, 
dark, dismal evening. ' The House was, therefore, listless, 
sombre, and but thinly filled when Sexton rose. He spoke 
for two hours, not amid the enthusiastic plaudits which greet 
a powerful exponent of a great party's principles, but amid 
chilling silence, interrupted but occasionally by the thin cheers 
of the small group of Irishmen around him — and yet when he 
sat down the whole House instinctively felt that a great orator 
had appeared among them. Still there was no particular no- 
tice of this splendid effort in the newspapers ; it was reported 
in but a few lines. But members talked of it in the lobby 
and the smoke-room ; Sir Stafford Northcote was reported 
to have praised it highly, and, among members of the House 
of Commons at least, Sexton's reputation was established. 

In the councils of his party, the voice of Sexton has 
always been for good sense. Sagacity is, indeed, the very 
soul of his oratory. He not only says everything better 



334 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

than anybody else can say it, but he always says the right 
thing. To think of him merely as the eloquent speaker is to 
forget the still greater claim to respect he holds as a man of 
remarkably well-balanced mind, of keen and almost fault 
less judgment. And in connection with this it cannot have 
failed to strike any intelligent observer that there have been 
few men who are less controlled by words than this master of 
words ; for, in spite of the many speeches he has delivered 
within the last few years, there cannot be pointed out a sin- 
gle sentence which could give just offence to any section of 
patriotic Irishmen. To say the right thing is much ; to leave 
unsaid the wrong thing counts, in politics, even for something 
more. To describe the characteristics of Sexton's oratory is 
a task of extreme difficulty. He can marshal facts ; he can 
discuss figures with the driest statistician, and can balance 
arguments with the most logic-chopping member of the 
House ; and he can at the same time invest every subject 
with the glory of splendid language. He is at once orator 
and debater ; his manner fascinates, his matter convinces. 
The present writer best conveys his impression in listening to 
Sexton by saying that he would feel — if he were even antago- 
nistic to Sexton — that Sexton can use words as the rctiarius 
employed his net in the struggles of the gladiators. Sexton's 
opponent might think that his arguments were bad, that he 
was making the worse appear the better reason ; but all the 
same Sexton's vocabulary would so ensnare him as to leave 
him powerless to think or argue in reply. In short, Sexton 
can do what he likes with words. 

For the rest Sexton is a keen observer, and his reading 
of men's motives is helped by a slight dash of cynicism. In 
ordinary affairs blast and physically lethargic, his political 
industry is marvellous. He enters the House of Commons 
when the Speaker takes the chair, and never leaves it until 
the door-keeper's cry of ' Who goes home ? ' is heard. He 
sits in his place during all those long hours, grudging the 
time he spends at a hasty dinner — practically the one meal 
he takes in the day — or the few minutes he gives to the 
smoking of the dearly-loved cigar. Before he goes down to 
the House he has mastered all the business of the day, and 



THE LAND LEAGUE 335 

his breakfast is of Blue Books. Orderly in many of his habits, 
he rarely approaches the discussion of any question without 
full knowledge of all the facts carefully arranged and abun- 
dantly illustrated by letters or other documents. He has 
great mastery of detail. Probably he was the only one except 
Sir Charles Dilke who knew all the figures connected with 
the Redistribution Bill. With every measure that in the 
least degree concerns Ireland he is acquainted down to the 
last clause, and thus it is that he enters on all debates with a 
singularly complete equipment. Finally, his mind is extra- 
ordinarily alert. His opponent has scarcely sat down when he 
is on his feet with counter-arguments to meet even the plausible 
case that has been made against him. It seems impossible 
to take him unawares, and words come without hesitation to 
express every shape of meaning. This gift, aided by sang- 
froid, makes him a most formidable opponent, and even the 
Speaker, backed by all the new rules of the House, and his 
own large and generous interpretation of his powers, has had 
more than once to succumb before the ready answer and the 
cool temper of Mr. Sexton. 

When Mr. Parnell made his first attempt to enter political 
life at the county Dublin election of 1874, one of the main 
objections against him, as will be remembered, was that he 
had the highest of high English accents. Then his manner 
was regarded as Saxon in its reserve, and his speech was still 
more Saxon in its rigidity. But Mr. Parnell has a violent 
brogue, is open-heartedness personified, and speaks with a 
tongue of flame when he is brought in contrast with Arthur 
O'Connor. Not one man in a hundred would ever guess 
when he heard him addressing the House of Commons that 
O'Connor had a drop of Irish blood in his veins. The whole 
air of the member for Queen's County is rigid, serious, icy. 
He drops his words with calculated slowness, and the subjects 
he selects for treatment are dry and formal and statistical — 
the subjects, in short, which are supposed to attract the 
plodding mind of the typical Englishman. The physique 
of Arthur O'Connor, too, suggests the same idea of a calm- 
ness and unemotional self-control which an Irishman is rarely 
supposed to possess ; he is tall, thin, with a sombre air, and a 



336 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

cold, dark-blue eye. But to those who have learned to know 
him, all these outward presentments are but a mask ; in the 
whole Irish party — with all its fierce and strange spirits — 
there is not one whose heart beats with emotion so profound, 
with a hatred so fierce, a holy rage so lethal. The keen 
analysis of the French mind has divided enthusiasm into two 
kinds — the enthusiasm that is warm and the enthusiasm that 
is cold. The enthusiasm of Arthur O'Connor is of the cold, 
that is of the perilous, type. 

Arthur O'Connor was born in London on October I, 1844. 
His father was a county Kerry man, and was for many years 
one of the most eminent physicians, and at the same time 
one of the best known figures in the social life of London. 
Arthur was educated at Ushaw ; and in the year 1863 began 
life for himself by competing for a clerkship in the War 
Office. There was but one vacancy, and there were thirty 
competitors ; O'Connor got the place, obtaining a higher 
average of marks than any Civil Service competitor for many 
years. For the space of sixteen years the young Irishman 
led the dull, sombre, monotonous life of the Civil Servant in 
the gloomy building in Pall Mall. He was a model clerk in 
many ways, and in others the very antithesis of what a clerk 
should be. He was a model clerk in being always accurate, 
attentive, hardworking ; there never was, and there never 
could be, a charge of a single act of neglect or stupidity 
during the entire period. But outside his office Arthur 
O'Connor was the most unclerklike of men. He had poli- 
tical opinions —and political opinions of the most unpopular, 
the most unfashionable, above all of the most unprofitable, 
character. An effusive and unmeaning address to some 
monarchical personage was once being hawked around the 
War Office ; it came in the end to Arthur O'Connor's desk. 
' If you don't take that away,' said O'Connor to the gentle- 
man who was collecting signatures, ' before I count twenty, I 
will put it into the fire.' Then he not only professed Irish 
National principles, but he joined an Irish organisation, and 
in time became one of its rulers ; for he was elected a member 
of the executive of the Home Rule Confederation. Finally, 
he began to be seeq, in the lobby in the House of Commons 



THE LAND LEAGUE 337 

in earnest and frequent colloquy with Mr. Parnell, and the 
whisper went abroad that the statistical clerk was priming 
the Irish agitator with obstructive powder and shot. In this 
connection it may just be as well to make the passing ob- 
servation that O'Connor never on a single occasion told Mr. 
Parnell even one word in reference to matters which official 
honour called upon him to keep private. The gorge of the 
War Office rose at these various enormities, and the clerk got 
more than one hint that these things were not unnoticed by 
his superior officers. O'Connor, however, strong in the sense 
of his impregnability as an official, treated all these threats 
with scorn ; and on one occasion, when one of his chiefs came 
to patronise him, actually turned round and patronised his 
superior. ' I always took a great interest in you,' said 
Arthur to his astounded elder. ' Why ? ' asked the superior 
officer. ' Because you entered this office on the same day as 
I was born.' Nevertheless, Arthur O'Connor was by no 
means anxious to remain in his dingy rooms in Pall Mall. 
Under a scheme of reorganisation, an offer was made to him, 
as well as to other clerks, to retire if he chose. He did 
so choose, and shook the dust of the War Office from off 
his feet. 

He had already given a taste of his quality as a political 
gladiator in minor theatres, and the poor-law guardian in his 
case was veritably the father of the member of Parliament. 
In 1879 he was elected member of the Chelsea Board of 
Guardians, and the main purpose which he and his friends 
had in getting this place was that he might look after Catho- 
lic interests. These interests did, indeed, stand in sad need of 
some advocate. For six months, not one of the Catholic 
inmates of the workhouse had been allowed to go out to Mass, 
either on a Sunday or on a holiday ; nor was a Catholic priest 
permitted to enter the place ; no Catholic prayer-books were 
given to be read, and the Catholic children were sent to Pro- 
testant schools ; and, finally, the institution was not stained 
by having a single ' Romanist ' — as the phrase went in the 
vocabulary of the Board — among its officials. On the very 
first day on which O'Connor took his seat, the most eligible 
of all the applicants for the humble position of ' scrubber ' was 



338 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

rejected on the sole ground that he was a Catholic. This was 
the large and complete penal code which the new member 
set out to destroy, and the task seemed certainly audacious 
and desperate enough. The board consisted of twenty mem- 
bers. O'Connor was the single Catholic in the whole number 
— it was one man against nineteen. O'Connor started on his 
enterprise in a characteristic fashion. He was not aggressive in 
manner, nor violent in language ; he made no speeches either 
strong or long, nor did he, on the other hand, intrigue, or 
smile or coax. He relied on two weapons alone — the weapons 
of knowledge and of hard work. He first mastered the whole 
complicated system of the poor-law code : and O'Connor's 
power of learning rules is now well known to every member 
of the House of Commons. It is reported that Lord Hampden, 
when Speaker, once declared to a Radical member that when- 
ever Arthur O'Connor stood up to raise a point upon the rules 
of the House, he always took up his note-book. Lord Hamp- 
den had a note-book of his own compilation, in which there 
was a very perfect mine of Parliamentary rules and precedents, 
and this note-book he consulted whenever he was confronted 
by a more than usually knotty point, or an uncommonly stiff 
opponent. After a while O'Connor had become such an 
expert in the law of the workhouse, and was withal so calm 
and so composed, that his fellow-guardians found he was a 
man who could take care of himself in all instances. Their 
first step was to abandon any attempt to trip him up, and 
the next step was that some of them began to seek his aid 
as an ally whenever there was any proposal which they 
thought required strong backing. 

But this was only a small part of O'Connor's work. He 
had been elected a member of the General Purposes Com- 
mittee — this was when he was still an unknown quantity to 
his fellow-guardians — and the General Purposes was the most 
important of all the committees. It was the committee which 
had the contracts to give and to examine, which dealt with 
accounts and other matters of high import in the economy 
of the workhouse. O'Connor devoted days and weeks to the 
study of all these accounts, with the result that he knew every 
item as intimately as if he had to pay it out of his own 



THE LAND LEAGUE 339 

pocket. This was of all forms of knowledge the one which 
made O'Connor most formidable. It became impossible for 
a penny to pass muster for which full and satisfactory ex- 
planation was not given — jobbery trembled beneath the piti- 
less eye of this cold and calm inquisitor, and rogues fled 
abashed. All this could not be accomplished without terribly 
hard work. The meeting of the General Purposes Com- 
mittee and of the Board was on the same day —Wednesday 
— and every Wednesda)^ as inevitable as night or death, 
O'Connor was in his place on the Committee or at the Board ; 
and though this work often extended continuously from ten 
o'clock in the morning till eight at night, with the exception 
of half-an-hour for lunch, in his place he remained all the 
time. For not one minute could he be induced to leave the 
room, for even a minute's absence might enable the jobber to 
rush through his scheme ; and not even a farthing would 
O'Connor allow to pass without criticism, if criticism were 
demanded. The Board was shocked at this indecent scrupu- 
lousness, this shocking conscientiousness, this rude industry, 
and disappointed jobbers began to ask how it was that a man 
could at the same time perform efficiently the duties of a 
Civil Servant and a poor-law guardian. ' How,' asked a 
guardian, 'could Mr. O'Connor attend every Wednesday, 
without exception, from ten to eight, without neglecting his 
official duties for at least one tlay in the week ? ' This guar- 
dian resolved to have the matter out, and proposed a resolu- 
tion calling the attention of the Secretary for War to the 
conduct of the War Office clerk. The gentleman's disgust 
may be imagined when Mr. O'Connor himself stood up to 
second the resolution ; and so had it laughed out of court. 
O'Connor had nothing to fear from any investigation by the 
War Secretary, or anybody else, for he had not neglected 
his official duties : he had not lost one single day, and the 
manner in which he carried out this programme is eminently 
characteristic, and will indicate the kind of man he is. In 
the War Office, as in the other Civil Service departments, 
each clerk is entitled to a month's vacation, and this vacation 
he is generally allowed to take at such times as he may wish. 
He may take it in a continuous month, or in a week now and 



340 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

a week again, or even by days if he like. Now the year of 
the War Office began in January ; that of the Board of 
Guardians some months subsequently ; the poor-law year, 
therefore, overlapped the year of the War Office. Thus 
O'Connor was able to take the War Office vacation of two 
years within the single year of the Board ; and his two years' 
vacation were the Wednesdays which he spent at the Board 
of Guardians ! The men are not many who would seek re- 
creation, rest, enjoyment, in ten hours' work every Wednes- 
day of every week, and in work without pay, without glory, 
and entirely for the benefit of the poorest and lowliest of 
mankind. The reader will, of course, understand that all this 
labour was but a means to an end. O'Connor, of course, 
found some pleasure in learning the details of the poor-law ; 
he did consider it part of his duty to prevent jobbery ; but the 
legal lore and the prevention of jobbery were but means to 
an end, and that end was the abolition of the vile system of 
intolerance under which the Catholic poor were suffering. 
Never was reformer so completely and so rapidly successful. 
He was but one year a member of the Board of Guardians — 
the combined forces of bigotry and jobbery took care that he 
should not be elected a second time. As has been said, he 
was one Catholic against nineteen Protestants, most of them 
bigoted Protestants, too ; and at the end of that year every 
Catholic could go to church on Sunday or holiday ; the 
Catholic priest was admitted to the workhouse once a week 
to instruct the inmates ; Catholic prayer-books were dis- 
tributed in the same way as Protestant ; Catholic children 
were sent to Catholic schools : in short, of the vast multitude 
of Catholic grievances not one remained unredressed. And 
yet all this had been accomplished without a departure, 
perhaps, for one second, on the part of O'Connor, from his 
cold, calm delivery : without one violent word, wii.h that 
exterior of perfect and, on occasion, almost genial cour- 
tesy, under which lay concealed fierce passion and relentless 
purpose. 

O'Connor also served for a year as a member of the 
Chelsea Vestry. He had not here the same great motive for 
activity as on the Board of Guardians ; but, nevertheless, he 



THE LAND LEAGUE 341 

made his presence soon and severely felt One of O'Connor's 
first acts threw a considerable light on his sharpness of per- 
ception, and, at the same time, on the curious manners and 
methods of the London vestries. The auditors, having 
brought in their half-yearly report, Mr. O'Connor made the 
request that he should see the manuscript of the report. The 
manuscript was produced, and, as O'Connor suspected, 
it was in the hand of the Clerk of the Board — the man 
whose accounts were principally the subject of examination. 
It turned out that the virtuous auditors and the clerk had 
dined together— of course at the expense of the clerk ; and 
had gone through the harsh and rigorous work of auditing the 
accounts amid the softening pleasantness of the post-prandial 
hour'. Mr. O'Connor was put forward as a candidate for the 
Southwark district of the School Board, but was defeated) 
chiefly owing to the fact that two hundred of his supporters 
came up late to the poll. The one remaining part of Arthur 
O'Connor's ante-parliamentary career which need be noticed 
was his connection with the Catholic Union. That body, as 
is known, was founded for the purpose of advocating Catholic 
interests in Great Britain and Ireland. O'Connor took upon 
himself the duty of attending to the registration of voters, and 
he succeeded in thoroughly organising several London con- 
stituencies. When he had a portion of this work done, the 
notable discovery was made by one of the English members 
of the Union that it was Irish, not Catholic, voters whom 
O'Connor had been getting on the lists. O'Connor made the 
pretty obvious retort that Catholic and Irish were practically 
synonymous terms so far as the duty of working up registra- 
tion was concerned ; the Catholics who were English, belong- 
ing, as a rule, to the wealthier classes, could look after their 
own registration. This logic did not recommend itself to the 
authorities of the Union, and registration was suspended. 
This display of anti-Irish bigotry on the part of English 
Catholics was one of the many reasons which induced 
O'Connor to leave the Union, and the same course drove him 
out of St. George's Club— another association intended for 
Catholics in England. 

Arthur O'Connor's part in Parliament has been such as 



342 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

one might have anticipated from his previous career. He at 
once devoted himself to the work which was sorest and most 
uninviting ; had acquired in a short time a knowledge so 
intimate of the rules of the House as to be that terror to the 
Speaker of which mention has been made, and was a more 
potent, more dangerous, a more detailed critic of the Estimates 
than Parnell or Biggar in their palmiest and most ' active ' 
days. It was curious to see O'Connor enter the House with a 
bundle of notes, which apparently must have consumed days 
in their preparation ; to hear him put Mr. Courtney to shame 
as he described the extravagant wages of a charwoman in the 
Foreign Office ; and to bring confusion to the mind of the 
First Commissioner of Works as he dilated on the bad 
quality of the mortar in the last repairs of a Royal Palace. 
All this was done with an air of unbroken severity, but, at the 
same time, of unruffled temper and of inflexible courtesy. 
O'Connor was the calm, patient, lofty spirit of economy that 
chided, but pitied, and that spoke in the accents of sorrow 
rather than of anger. But he would go on criticising, however 
painful the duty. One item disposed of, another was taken 
up ; that disposed of, there was yet another item ; and so 
on through the countless figures of the huge volumes that 
contain the Estimates. But it was not always criticism or 
always complaint. At some moments it was an explanation 
which O'Connor prayed for with his inimitable air of sad 
deference. A small speech was required, of course, to preface 
the inquiry. The Minister having answered a second speech 
was necessary in order to have a further word on just a trifling 
little difficulty that still remained to disturb O'Connor's mind. 
Then the Minister again explained, and O'Connor, now 
fully satisfied, had to express his gratitude and content ; 
and the expression of his gratitude and content required 
a third speech. And thus it went on hour after hour — 
O'Connor calm, deferential, appallingly inquisitive, miracu- 
lously omniscient — the Minister restless, apologetic, divided, 
between the desire to swear and the dread of its conse- 
quences — with the result that, when the night was over, 
the Treasury had got about one out of every fifteen votes 
it had hoped to carry. Work of this kind, which is con- 



THE LAND LEAGUE 343 

stantly done by such men as O'Connor and Biggar — and in 
former days by gallant Lysaght Finigan — is and can never 
be reported, is rarely even described, is rarely even heard of; 
but it is in willingly, patiently, relentlessly, continuously 
going through the hideous drudgery of unrecognised toil like 
this that such men show the depths of their self-devotion, 
the reality and earnestness of their self-forgetfulness. Before 
passing from O'Connor's part in Parliament, let there be just 
a few words about his style of speech. With the doubtful 
exception of Mr. Parnell, Arthur O'Connor has the most 
thoroughly and the best House-of-Commons style of any 
man in the party. Clear, deliberate, passionless in language, 
gesture, delivery, he is the very best model of an official 
speaker. The narrow limits within which he confines him- 
self do injustice to his powers. The only occasion on which 
he did prominently enter into general debate was on 
the Bradlaugh question ; and his answer to Mr. Bright on 
that occasion suggested possibilities of sober, but lofty elo- 
quence. 

Finally, sufficient has been written of Arthur O'Connor 
to make intelligible the high respect, and even affection, in 
which he is held by his friends and colleagues. The sternness 
of his faith does not prevent him from being one of the kind- 
liest of companions, one of the most tolerant and even- 
tempered of counsellors ; though he has much of the antique 
Roman, he has much also of the social charms of the modern 
Irishman. 

Few pages are more picturesque, or more touching even, 
in ' New Ireland ' than those in which A. M. Sullivan de- 
scribes the native place of himself and his family, and the 
changes that the years have made in it. 

Revisiting recently (he writes), the scenes of my early life, I realised 
more vividly than ever the changes which thirty years had effected. 
I sailed once more over the blue waters of the bay on which I was, 
so to say, cradled ; climbed the hills and trod the rugged denies of 
Glengariffe and Beara, by paths and passes learnt in childhood, 
and remembered still. . . . The extreme south-west of Ireland, the 
Atlantic angle formed by West Cork and Kerry, iong had a peculiar 



344 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

interest for the student of Irish history. ... In the last formidable 
struggle of the Gaelic princes for native sovereignty this region per- 
formed in the South very much the part which Donegal played 
in the North ; the three men under whom the final campaign of 
1595-1599 was fought being Hugh O'Neill, Prince of Tyrone ; Hugh 
O'Donnell, Prince of Tyrconnell : and Donal O'Sullivan, chieftain of 
Beara. In that struggle Spain was the ally of the Irish chiefs, and 
the proximity of the Carbery and Beara headlands to the Iberian 
peninsula— the facilities offered by their deep bays and ready har- 
bours for the landing of expeditions, envoys, arms, and subsidies — 
gave to the district that importance which it retained down to 1796, 
when it was the scene of the attempted, or rather intended, French 
invasion under Hoche. Declared forfeit in 1607, on the conclusion 
of the campaign above referred to, confiscated again in 1641, and 
a third time in 1691, Beara at length passed totally from the 
O'Sullivans. The last notable member of the disinherited family 
entered the service of France with the Irish army under Sarsfield, on 
the capitulation of Limerick. The clansmen scowled on the new 
landlords, who, indeed, for very long after never ventured upon even 
a visit to the place. From 1700 to 1770, as Mr. Fro ude has very 
graphically described, Bantry and the surrounding bays were the 
great outlets through which, in defiance of the utmost power and 
vigilance of the Government, shiploads of recruits for the Irish 
Brigade (called ' wild geese ' in the bills of lading) and cargoes or 
wool (at that time forbidden to be exported) were despatched to 
France, Spain, and the Low Countries. In the smuggling, or expor- 
tation, of contraband fleeces and importation of silk, brandy, and 
tobacco, the population pushed a lucrative and exciting trade down 
very nearly to the close of the last century, when it may be said 
to have totally disappeared. Henceforward they devoted themselves 
exclusively and energetically to a combination of fishing and petty 
agriculture. . . . Few sights could be more picturesque than 
the ceremony by which in our bay the fishing season was formally 
opened. Selecting an auspicious day, unusually calm and fine, 
the boats, from every creek and inlet for miles around, assembled at 
a given point, and then, in solemn procession, rowed out to sea, the 
leading boat carrying the priest of the district. Arrived at the distant 
fishing ground, the clergyman vested himself, an altar was improvised 
on the stern-sheets, the attendant fleet drew around, and every head 
was bared and bowed while the Mass was said. I have seen this 
' Mass on the ocean ' when not a breeze stirred, and the tinkle of the 
little bell or the murmur of the priest's voice was the only sound that 



THE LAND LEAGUE 345 

reached the ear ; the blue hills of Bantry faint on the horizon behind 
us, and nothing nearer beyond than the American shore. Where 
are all these now ? The ' Mass on the ocean ' is a thing of the past, 
heard of and seen no more ; one of the old customs gone apparently 
for ever. The fishermen — the fine big-framed fellows, of tarry hands 
and storm-stained faces ? The workhouse or the grave holds all 
who are not docksidemen on the Thames or the Mersey, on the 
Hudson or the Mississippi. The boats ? I saw nearly all that remains 
of them when I last visited the little cove that in my early days 
scarce sufficed to hold the fleet at low water ; skeleton ribs protrud- 
ing here and there from the sand, or the shattered hulks helplessly 
mouldering under the trees that dropped into the tide when at 
full. 

Such is in brief a sketch of the place in which Timothy 
Daniel Sullivan — the future ballad-writer of the Irish National 
cause — was born in 1827. The father of the Sullivans was in 
but moderate circumstances, but education and refinement de- 
scend socially deeper in Ireland than in most other countries 
— certainly than in England ; and the parent of T. D. Sulli- 
van and his brothers was a man of considerable culture. The 
mother was likewise a woman of large gifts, well trained, and 
was for many years a National school teacher. She seems to 
have had, besides, a very attractive personality, one proof of 
which is the tradition that she was a godmother to half the 
children born during her time in Bantry. The home of the 
Sullivans was thoroughly National, and amid the stirring times 
of 1 848, and the hideous disasters of the two preceding years, 
there were all the circumstances to make the National faith 
of the family bitter and robust. The father was carried away, 
like the majority of the earnest and energetic Irishmen of that 
time, by the gospel which the Young Ireland leaders were 
preaching with such fascination of voice and pen, became one 
of the leaders of the local '48 club, and, as a reward, was dis- 
missed from his employment by one of the local magistrates. 
One of the episodes of this time is justly treasured by the 
whole family. Smith O'Brien, shortly before the insurrec- 
tion, went on a tour of inspection through the south-west and 
southern countries in order to test the feeling of the people. 
He received a big welcome from the people of the coast, and 



346 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

when passing from Glengariffe to Bantry, across the bay, he 
had a demonstration — Venetian rather than Irish in its char- 
acter. Around the boat in which was made the small voyage 
gathered the fleet of these fishing smacks, whose decadence 
A. M. Sullivan has so eloquently described, and the little 
yacht which carried the future rebel leader and his fortunes 
was the property of the Sullivans. 

T. D. Sullivan, like the rest of his brothers, though brought 
up in a small and remote town, had an opportunity of re- 
ceiving a good education in the best sense of the word, and 
the family was essentially literary as well as national in its 
tendencies. The Sullivans were closely associated with another 
Bantry household, which was destined by-and-by to give a 
prominent figure to the Irish history of the present day. 
The chief and the best schoolmaster of the town was Mr. 
Healy, the grandfather of the present member for South Deny. 
Under his charge T. D. Sullivan was placed, after he had made 
a beginning in the National school, and it was from Mr. Healy 
that Mr. Sullivan learned probably the most of what he 
knows, for Mr. Healy belonged to that race of fine scholars 
who were to be found in the old days in nearly all the towns 
in Munster. The ties between the two families were after- 
wards drawn still closer when T. D. Sullivan married Miss 
Kate Healy, the daughter of his teacher. Though A. M. 
Sullivan was younger than T. D., he was the first to leave 
home and seek fortune abroad. After trying his hand as an 
artist, A. M. ultimately adopted journalism as a profession, 
and became connected with the Dublin 'Nation.' T. D. 
meantime had also allowed his mind to run into dreams of a 
literary future, and had early discovered his talent for versifi- 
cation. In fact, he had filled a whole volume with his com- 
positions ; but, with the secrecy which youth loves, he had 
not confided his transgression to anyone. But two or three 
of the pieces had even appeared in print, and practically it 
was not till he came to Dublin and began to write in the 
' Nation ' that the poetical genius of T. D. Sullivan sought 
recognition. Into the columns of that journal he began at 
once to pour the verses which he had hitherto so religiously 



THE LAND LEAGUE 347 

kept secret, and from the first his songs attracted attention. 
He had not been more than a few months on the ' Nation ' 
when a musical composer called on the then editor, Mr. 
Cashel Hoey, to ask permission to publish two of the poems 
which had recently appeared in the paper. One of these was 
signed with the now well-known initials, ' T. D. S.,' while the 
other bore a different signature ; but both were from the 
same pen. From this time forward the name of T. D. 
Sullivan is inextricably associated with the ' Nation.' 

Though T. D. Sullivan has written love-poems, and tender 
elegies, his preference has always been for the muse that 
stirs and cheers. Many of his poems became popular imme- 
diately on their appearance, and spread over that vast world 
of the Irish race which now extends through so many of the 
nations of the earth. A well-known story with regard to the 
' Song from the Backwoods ' will illustrate the influence of 
T. D. Sullivan's muse. Most Irishmen know that splendid 
little poem, with its bold opening, and its splendid re- 
frain : — 

Deep in Canadian woods we've met, 

From one bright island flown ; 
Great is the land we tread, but yet 

Our hearts are with our own. 
And ere we leave this shanty small, 
While fades the autumn day, 
We'll toast old Ireland ! 
Dear Old Ireland ! 
Ireland, boys, hurrah ! 

The song, which was published in the 'Nation' in 1857, 
first became popular among the members of the Phoenix 
Society — who, it will be remembered, were at work in 1858 
— and was carried to America by Captain D. J. Downing, 
one of the association. It rapidly became popular, both 
among the Fenians, who were beginning to be organised, and 
among the Irish soldiers who were fighting in the American 
army. Every man of the Irish Brigade knew it, and it was 
often sung at the bivouac fire after a hard day's fighting. 
An extraordinary instance of its popularity was given by a 



348 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

writer, signing himself Romeo,' in the ' New York Irish People' 
of March 9, 1867. ' On the night,' he writes, ' of the bloody 
battle of Fredericksburg, the Federal army lay sleepless and 
watchful on their arms, with spirits damped by the loss of so 
many gallant comrades. To cheer his brother officer, Cap- 
tain Downing sang his favourite song. The chorus of the 
first stanza was taken up by his dashing regiment, next by 
the brigade, next by the division, then by the entire line 
of the army for six miles along the river ; and when the cap- 
tain ceased, it was but to listen with indefinable feelings to 
the chant that came like an echo from the Confederate lines 
on the opposite shore of 

Dear Old Ireland, 
Brave Old Ireland, 
Ireland, boys, hurrah ! 

The song ' God save Ireland ' became popular with even 
greater rapidity. It was issued at an hour when all Ireland 
was stirred to intenser depths of anger and of sorrow than 
perhaps at any single moment in the last quarter of a cen- 
tury, and this profound and immense feeling longed for a 
voice. When ' God save Ireland ' was produced the people 
at once took it up, and so instantaneously that the author 
himself heard it sung and chorussed in a railway carriage on 
the very day after its publication in the ' Nation.' 

On several other occasions the pen of T. D. Sullivan has 
given popular expression to popular sentiment. It has been 
his invariable rule in composing these songs to make them 
' ballads ' in the true sense of the word — songs, that is to say, 
that expressed popular sentiment in the language of every- 
day life, that had good catching rhymes, and that could be 
easily sung. Some of his very best poems were written 
during the Land League agitation, and will be very useful 
to the historian of that movement in the insight they afford 
of the central idea of the people at each succeeding stage 
during that memorable struggle. An immense fillip was un- 
doubtedly given to the demand for abatements of rent by the 
song, ' Griffith's Valuation ' — - 



THE LAND LEAGUE 349 

Farmers far and near, 

Long despoiled by plunder, 
Let your tyrants hear 

Your voices loud as thunder 
Shout from shore to shore 

Your firm determination 
To pay in rents no more 

Than ' Griffith's Valuation.' . 
That's the word to say 

To end their confiscation ; 
That's the rent to pay — 

' Griffith's Valuation.' 

Still more successful, perhaps, was the ballad of ' Murty 
Hynes.' Nobody, probably, has forgotten the story of the 
converted land-grabber of the county Gahvay, who was in- 
duced to surrender a holding from which another tenant had 
been evicted. The poem in which T. D. Sullivan has cele- 
brated this historic episode is, in the opinion of the present 
writer, one of the most felicitous compositions that ever came 
from his pen. The imitation of the style and tone of the 
street ballad in the following verses is excellent : — 

Come, all true sons of Erin, I hope you will draw near, 
A new and true narration I mean to let you hear ; 
'Tis for your information I pen these simple lines, 
Concarnin' of the Land League, likewise of Murty Hynes. 

The place that Murty lives in is hancry to Loughrea, 
The man is good and dacent, but he was led astray ; 
He did what every Christian must call a burnin' shame, 
But now he has repented, and cleared his honest name. 

For when upon the roadside poor Bermingham was sint, 
Because with all his strivin' he could not pay the rint, 
And keep ould Lord Dunsandle in horses, dogs, and wines, 
Who comes and takes the houldin' but foolish Murty Hynes ? 

But when the noble Land League got word of this disgrace, 
They sint a man to Murty to raison out the case ; 
' I own my crime,' says Murty, ' but I'll wash out the stain : 
I'll keep that farm no longer ; I'll give it up again.' 



350 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

And then he wrote a letter and sint it to the Lague, 
Saying ' From the cause of Ireland I never will renege, 
And never more I promise, while Heaven above me shines, 
Will I for land go grabbin',' says honest Murty Hynes. 

Och ! whin the people heard it, they gathered in a crowd, 
The boys brought out their banners, and bate their drums aloud, 
And there was songs and speeches, and dancin' light and gay, 
Around the flamin' bonfires that night in old Loughrea. 

Now all true sons of Erin, wherever you may be, 

Come join in celebratin' this glorious victoree, 

And by Columbia's rivers, and 'midst Canadian pines, 

Give three cheers for the Land League, and nine for Murty 

Hynes. 
In a few days this ballad had made its way all over 
Ireland, was learned by every itinerant songster of the 
country, and sold by the tens of thousands. When T. D. 
Sullivan was being tried as one of the traversers in the 
famous case of the Queen v. Parnell and others, the poem of 
' Murty Hynes ' was one of the pieces de conviction. Mr. 
Peter O'Brien, who was Mr. Sullivan's counsel, wished to read 
.the poem to the jurors, but Crown counsel objected ; and 
Judge Fitzgerald, on being appealed to, decided the point by 
saying that he would allow Mr. O'Brien to bring the ballad 
in evidence if he would sing it — one of the few jokes that en- 
livened the monotonous dullness of the Parnell trials. 

One other of the poems of T. D. Sullivan played a part 
in the trial of the traversers. By way of proving the nature 
of the doctrines preached by the Land League, the late Mr. 
Law, the then Attorney- General, quoted from a poem called 
' Our Vow ' the following stanza : — 

No, we shall leave untilled, unsown, 

The lands, however fair, 
From which an honest man was thrown 

Upon the roadside bare. 
As if a curse was on the spot, 

That saw such hateful deeds, 
We'll leave the empty house to rot, 

The fields to choke with weeds. 

' By an honest man,' commented the Attorney-General, ' in 



THE LAND LEAGUE 351 

this composition, I suppose, is meant a man who refuses to 
pay Ins rent.' 

It will not be necessary to write at any great length of 
the Parliamentary career of T. D. Sullivan. He was elected, 
as is known, along with Mr. H. J. Gill, for county Westmeath, 
at the General Election of 1880 ; and, in spite of the absorbing 
nature of his journalistic duties he has been one of the most 
active and one of the most attentive members of the party. 
He has been perhaps still more prominent on the platform : 
and it is at large Irish popular gatherings that his speech is 
most effective. He is Irish of the Irish and expresses the 
deep and simple gospel of the people in language that goes 
home ; and then his keen sense of humour enables him to 
supply that element of amusement which is always looked 
forward to with eagerness by the crowd. It need scarcely be 
said that he has always been one of the most sagacious, as 
well as one of the most loyal, of the supporters of Mr. Parnell. 
Like other men, he has sometimes been overborne by the 
opinions of others, but when the decision of the majority 
was given, there was not a moment of hesitation in standing 
by the unity of the party. In another way T. D. Sullivan 
has been one of the best factors in the party. More advanced 
in years than many of his colleagues, he has nevertheless been 
as young as the youngest among them in his energy and in 
his hopefulness — and the long and dreary nights of struggle 
in the House of Commons put the energy and the hopeful- 
ness of any man to a very severe test. Like Mr. Biggar, 
Mr. Sullivan has shrunk from no work which the exigencies 
of the situation demanded, and has been ready to take his 
share of the talking — whether the House considered his 
intervention seasonable or unseasonable ; whether he spoke 
to benches that were full or empty, silent or uproarious. 
Erring, perhaps, as a rule, on the side of o^er-earnestness, 
he often lights up his Parliamentary, like his conversational, 
efforts with bright flashes of wit. Speaking of special clauses 
in the Crimes Act for the protection of certain humble agents 
of the law one night he declared, ' There's a divinity doth 
hedge a bailiff rough h'use him how we will.' His drinking 
the health of the Land League at the close of one of his 



352 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

speeches in the House was an incident of a thoroughly 
original nature. He had defended that body in a long 
speech from charges that had been made against it. 'And 
now, Mr. Speaker,' said he, taking up the glass of water 
which he had by him on the bench, and raising it to his lips, 
' all I have to say in conclusion is — Here's long life and good 
health to the Irish National Land League.' ' Punctuality,' 
he said once to a colleague who turned up at a meeting with 
characteristic lateness, ' punctuality, in the opinion of the 
Irish party, is the thief of time.' Some of his lighter poems 
are greater favourites with many people than his more serious 
efforts, because of this same vein of irrepressible humour. 
Nothing could be much more amusing than the picture in 
the poem, ' Mr. Gladstone and Irish Ideas,' of the Premier's 
visit to an Exhibition, at which he was induced to test the 
Irish whisky. 

It is when the county meeting is over, and T. D. Sullivan 
sits amid a genial crowd of sympathetic friends, that his best — 
certainly his most attractive — talents are seen. Like all the 
Sullivan family, he has plenty of musical ability, and like 
poor A. M., has a splendid voice. A song by T. D. Sullivan 
has never been really understood until it has been heard 
sung by T. D. himself. His voice — loud, clear, penetrating — 
easily leads the chorus, no matter how many voices join in, 
and he throws himself into the spirit of the thing with all 
his heart and soul. His singing of ' Murty Hynes ' is worth 
going many miles to hear. Indeed, there is scarcely an 
Irishman living who could give an evening's entertainment 
so complete as T, D. Sullivan ; and if he were ever to assume 
the profession of a public lecturer his success would be un- 
questioned. A series of lectures in which he would give 
recitations from his own poems and sing his own songs 
would draw overflowing audiences in New York or Boston, 
Philadelphia or Chicago. He certainly would spare his 
manager any expense ol advertising, for there is scarcely an 
Irish home among all the millions of Irish homes in America 
in which his verses are not familiar as household words. 

Such has been the career of T. D. Sullivan — honourable, 
consistent, and tranquil. He has to-day the same convictions 



THE LAND LEAGUE 353 

which guided his pen when he wrote surreptitious verses ; he 
has stood by these convictions through years of trial and 
failure ; he is as fresh and as vigorous in pushing them 
forward at this hour, when his hairs are grey, as he was when 
he sailed in boyhood's auroral days over Bantry Bay. His 
verses have marked the epochs which they have helped to 
produce, have won for him the affection of millions of Irish 
hearts, and form one of the many potent chains of memory 
and love that bind the scattered children of the Celtic mother 
to their race and to their cradle-land. 

In one of his most powerful novels Balzac draws a 
portrait of a man who, equipped by nature with all the 
qualities to make a great commander, or a minister of genius, 
is forced, by the resistless facts of his country's and his own 
position, into a private life of small cares and large miseries. 
Such a lament over the waste of Irish genius would be trite ; 
yet the career which is about to be sketched will perhaps 
convince that, though the fate be old, its victims belong .to 
every year of Irish serfdom. The writer will have daubed 
his portrait if the reader do not believe that, born in another 
country and to other times, James O'Kelly might have left 
a name which his people would not let willingly die. 

O'Kelly was born in Dublin in the year 1845. He made 
acquaintance at an early age with the passions which make 
the Irish patriot. Among his companions in the Irish 
metropolis were a number of young men who, even in the 
dark hours between '55 and '65, worked and hoped for the 
elevation of the country : and, on the other hand, he learned 
in a school in London, in which he spent part of his boyhood, 
the scorn that belongs to the child of a conquered race. 
O'Kelly accordingly entered upon political work at an un- 
usually precocious age, and certainly had not reached his 
legal majority when political aims had become the lode-star 
of his dreams. This was the dark period when the treason 
of Sadleir and Keogh had broken all faith in Parliamentary 
activity and constitutional agitation ; and when Youth — 
especially if it had the mental and physical robustness of 
O'Kelly — was not inclined to listen to statistical comparisons 
between the resources of England and Ireland. The ' set ' 



354 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

to which O'Kelly belonged were certainly arch-heretics 
against the orthodox creed of constitutionalism, and had 
made up their minds to set about the liberation of Ireland 
in quite a different kind of style. The companions whom 
O'Kelly then made lived to try, and many of them to suffer 
for, their experiment. Many of them are dead. Some of 
them survived, and are to-day as active and as hopeful as if 
they had not passed through hideous suffering and abysmal 
disaster, O'Kelly was to meet some of them in after-life, in 
other lands, and with them to lay the foundations of a new 
and greater movement for Irish liberation. 

O'Kelly's political projects were interrupted in 1863. He 
had from boyhood longed for the life of a soldier. There 
was no army in Ireland, and he would not serve under the 
British flag, and — like so many of his race athirst for military 
glory — he entered the army of France. He had scarcely been 
enrolled m the Foreign Legion in Paris when he was called 
upon to enter into active service. The Arabs in the province 
of Oran were in rebellion, and here O'Kelly had an oppor- 
tunity of learning all the wiles as well as all the dangers of 
Arabian warfare. The rebellion had scarcely been suppressed 
when the French army was called to another and a very 
different scene of operations. Everybody remembers that 
when Maximilian was made Emperor of Mexico French 
forces were sent by the Emperor Napoleon to win for his 
nominee his new dominion, and O'Kelly's regiment was one 
of those which were detailed for this service. In all the 
fighting which went on O'Kelly had his share. He took part 
in the siege of Oajaca, and after the fall of that town and the 
capture of General Porfirio Diaz — since President of Mexico- 
he advanced northward, and was present at the various en- 
gagements which placed Monterey and the whole of Northern 
Mexico to the Rio Grande in the power of the French troops. 
Then the tide turned in favour of the Mexicans ; and at Mien 
the troops of Maximilian were disastrously beaten. During 
this engagement O'Kelly was slightly wounded, and shortly 
after he was made prisoner by the forces of General Canales 
in June 1866. O'Kelly had now a period of restraint, dis- 
comfort, possibly of danger, to look forward to ; but an 



THE LAND LEAGUE 355 

attempt to escape, unless successful, meant death. O'Kelly 
pondered over the situation for a considerable time ; but in 
the end decided to make a dash for liberty if anything like 
a fair opportunity presented. His guards proved careless, 
and in the darkness of the night he eluded their vigilance, 
and rushed out into the Unknown. For days he had to 
wander about in hourly peril of his life. At one time he took 
to the river, hoping to float down to the point where Mexican 
territory joined the United States. The inducement to 
attempt this mode of escape was his discovery by the banks 
of the river of what is called a ' dug-out ' — a rude boat made 
from a hollowed-out tree — and in this primitive craft he 
floated with the stream for a day. He had at last to come 
to land, owing to the attentions of some Mexicans on the 
shore. They proved, however, not unfriendly, and finally 
O'Kelly made his way into Texas. On American soil he 
was once more a free man ; but that was the end of his 
blessings. He had not a cent ; his clothes, after his many 
days of wandering, were ragged ; and who looks so dis- 
reputable as the soldier in a travel-stained uniform ? How- 
ever, O'Kelly managed to ' strike ' a fellow-countryman, and 
was by him given a job. The job — historical accuracy is 
especially desirable in the biography of a soldier— was that 
of removing some lumber. He managed finally to make his 
way to New York, and when he got there he was confronted 
with stirring news that led him for a while to the hope that 
the next time he went a-soldiering it would be for his own 
land. 

The stories which were current in these days of the 
possibilities and the resources for rebellion in Ireland have 
been described long since by many pens, and have produced 
a bitterness of controversy that warns off any writer. Suffice 
it to say that O'Kelly did not find things as he expected, 
that he had seen too much of real warfare to have any faith 
in unarmed crowds, and that he was one of those who most 
fiercely opposed any attempt at insurrection. Everybody 
knows that these counsels did not then prevail, and that in 
1865 there came some sporadic risings with their sad sequel 
of wholesale arrests, imprisonments, and long terms of penal 



356 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

servitude. By-and-by the movement began to be more 
serious, and in 1867 there seemed some hope of really vigor- 
ous work. O'Kelly then took his share of the danger and 
the responsibility, and was one of the chief men of the move- 
ment. For years he had to pass through the daily and 
nightly risks, the never-ceasing strain, the strange under- 
ground life, of the revolutionary. O'Kelly — as testimony is 
unanimous in declaring — passed through it all with that calm 
courage and that cool-headedness which everybody recog- 
nises, and, through determination, vigilance, and prudence 
combined, succeeded in coming out unscathed. Again the 
French cause drew him from politics, and during the Franco- 
Prussian war he rejoined the French army, but when Paris 
surrendered once more left the service. 

His thoughts now turned once more to America, and he 
went to New York. Up to this time he had not seriously 
contemplated adopting journalism as a profession, and his 
efforts had been confined to occasional correspondence in the 
National weeklies. He applied for a situation on the ' New 
York Herald,' and his application — like that of most begin- 
ners in all manners of life — was received coolly enough. At 
last, through the absence of all the regular employes of the 
journal on a special Sunday morning, O'Kelly got his oppor- 
tunity. General Sheridan was to arrive from Europe on that 
morning, and there was a general anxiety to know what the 
American Napoleon had to say about the military resources 
and the military strategy of the Old World. The task of 
interviewing so distinguished a soldier was a highly honour- 
able one, but it had one great drawback : General Sheridan 
was a man who was known to hold the ' interviewer ' in 
mortal hate. There was a whole host of reporters on board 
the steamer which went out to meet the General. The com- 
petition, therefore, was keen with a keenness which nobody 
who has not been in America can completely understand. 
Scratch the American journalist and you find a Red Indian, 
not content to kill unless he can also scalp his competitor. 
Each reporter, in his turn, tried his hand on the General, and 
each went back disappointed. At length O'Kelly made the 
attempt. He began his attack altogether out of the ordinary, 



THE LAND LEAGUE 357 

mentioned places in France which the General, as well as he, 
had recently seen, gave a military estimate or two, and in 
this way conveyed the impression to the General that he was 
something of a kindred spirit, and knew what he was talking 
about. The General unbent, and O'Kelly, who was the 
' greenhorn ' — as newcomers are scornfully called — of the 
journalistic host, was the one who was able to give the best 
account of General Sheridan's views on his European tour. 

O'Kelly, starting thus well, was gradually advanced, until 
he became one of the leader-writers — or ' editors,' as they 
are called in America — of the ' New York Herald.' In 1873 
there arose an opportunity of making or marring his fortune, 
an opportunity which O'Kelly gladly embraced, but which 
ninety-nine out of every hundred men would have absolutely 
and unhesitatingly rejected. The rebellion in Cuba was 
going on, and it was a movement in which the people of the 
United States took a keen interest, these being the days 
when the annexation of Cuba was one of the political possi- 
bilities and aspirations of the hour. But what was the nature 
and what the methods of the rebels ? These were points 
upon which no trustworthy information could apparently by 
any possibility be obtained. The Spaniards had the ear of the 
world, somewhat as England has in her struggle with Ireland, 
and the story they told was that there was no such a thing 
as a rebellion at all. If there had ever been anything of the 
kind, it was entirely crushed, and Cespedes, its leader, was 
dead. What now remained was simply a few scores of 
scattered marauders, who were nothing but itinerant robbers 
and murderers. There was a strong conviction in the United 
States that these representations were not altogether to be 
relied on, and there were plenty of Cuban refugees and in- 
surrectionary committees in the United States who circulated 
reports of quite a different character. It was said, for instance, 
that the Spanish troops were guilty of horrible cruelties, that 
they gave no quarter to men and foully abused women, and 
the rebellion, instead of being repressed, was represented as 
fiercer and more determined than ever ; but how were these 
statements to be confirmed ? The rebels, whether few or 
many, were hidden behind the impenetrable forests of the 



358 . THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Mambi Land — as the country frequented by them, was called 
— as completely as if they had ceased to exist. To reach 
these rebels, survey their forces — in short, attest their 
existence — was the duty which O'Kelly volunteered to 
perform. 

He knew when he set out for Cuba that his task was 
difficult enough, but it was not until he arrived in Cuba that 
he realised to the full the meaning of his enterprise. He 
imagined that he might have been able to accompany the 
Spanish troops, then to pass through their lines to the rebels, 
and, investigations among the latter being completed, to 
return to the Spanish lines again. He therefore asked a safe- 
conduct from the Captain-General ; but that functionary soon 
made it apparent that nothing would induce him to facilitate 
O'Kelly's task in any way, and he plainly told him that, if he 
persisted in trying to get to the rebels, he would do so at his 
own risk. O'Kelly soon realised the true meaning of these 
words. Throughout all Cuba there was a perfect reign of 
terror. Tribunals hastily tried even those suspected of 
treason, and within a few hours after his arrest the ' suspect ' 
was a riddled corpse. Any person who, therefore, wa^s under 
the frown of the authorities was avoided as if he had the 
plague. Thus O'Kelly was invited to dinner in the heartiest 
manner by a descendant of an Irishman, but when this 
gentleman heard of O'Kelly's mission, he begged him not to 
pay the visit, and promptly went to the Spanish authorities to 
explain the unlucky invitation. O'Kelly, therefore, was passing 
among a people nearly every one of whom dreaded to be seen 
even talking to him, and a vast number of whom would have 
considered it a patriotic duty to dispose of his person by 
some quiet but effective method. Then life was terribly 
insecure even to those who were not out of favour of autho- 
rity, murders for plunder being of daily occurrence. O'Kelly 
looked at the situation in the same way as was done under 
similar circumstances by another child of the Irish race, 
whom the ' New York Herald ' had the luck to secure to its 
service — poor J. A. MacGahan. ' It was not possible,' writes 
O'Kelly in ' The Mambi Land ' — the interesting volume in 
which he afterwards recounted his adventures — 'it was not 



THE LAND LEAGUE 359 

possible to turn back without dishonour, and though it cost 
even life itself, I would have to visit the Cuban camp.' ' My 
word,' he says in another place, ' had been given to accom- 
plish this, and at whatever cost it should be done '—language 
that in the mouth of a man like O'Kelly really means the 
resolve to meet the worst that fortune could inflict. 

He made various efforts to accompany expeditions of the 
Spanish troops which were supposed to be marching against 
the insurgents ; but these expeditions either were postponed, 
or, after they had been started, turned back without coming 
even within sight of the rebel lines. Then O'Kelly thought 
that his purpose might be carried out if he got into communi- 
cation with some of the secret sympathisers with the rebellion 
who remained in the towns ; but they, carrying their lives 
every hour in their hands, would not trust a stranger — especi- 
ally as the report had been industriously spread that O'Kelly 
was a friend to the Spaniards. At last he formed a desperate 
resolve : he determined to set out for the rebel lines alonej 
with the chances of being shot by the Spaniards as a rebel, 
by the rebels as a Spaniard, through a country which in 
parts was supposed to be overrun by robbers, quite ready to 
murder, with impartial ferocity, Spaniard or rebel ; and into 
the midst of almost impenetrable forest, where the loss of the 
trail meant death. But he had not proceeded far on his way 
when he was placed under arrest by the Spanish authorities. 
Then came an order which made the situation still more 
hopeless ; the order was that under no circumstances should 
O'Kelly be permitted to penetrate to the rebel lines, and the 
penalty was affixed in no obscure language. Brought before 
General Morales, one of the Spanish authorities, O'Kelly 
made the remark, ' I should regret very much if one of these 
days you should be obliged to shoot me.' ' I would regret it 
very much also,' was the reply of the Spaniard ; ' but if you 
are found in the insurgent lines or coming from them, you 
will .be treated as a spy or as one of the insurgents '- — in 
other words, shot. 

And still O'Kelly persevered. His plan now was to trust 
to the sympathisers with the rebellion ; and at last he found 
a letter on the floor of his room in his hotel one night, telling 



360 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

him that if he would proceed to a certain point alone on the 
following day, he would be conducted to the rebel lines. 
Every argument of prudence was against accepting this invi- 
tation, which might well be a trap ; but O'Kelly, armed with 
a couple of revolvers, set out the next day, reached the tryst- 
ing place, and after hours of waiting in the blackness of a 
dark night, was conducted into the rebel lines, saw General 
Cespedes, President of the Republic, and spent a month in 
marching and countermarching, and in generally studying the 
resources, the customs, and the prospects of the rebels. His 
task he had now succeeded in accomplishing, though every 
other person attempting it had failed. He had ascertained 
the existence and estimated the chances of the rebels, and 
the only thing now left for him was to return to America. 
Cespedes offered to send him home by Jamaica, but O'Kelly 
thought it necessary to go into the Spanish lines, in order 
that there might be no possibility of a denial that he had 
actually entered into the rebel camp. It will be remembered 
that General Morales had said to him, ' If you are found in 
the insurgent's lines, or going to them, or returning from them, 
you will be treated as a spy, .and he had scarcely returned to 
the settlements of the Spaniards when he found himself face 
to face with the prospect of this threat being carried into 
effect. He was thrown into a dungeon in a fortress, where 
the stench was terrible, his only companion a forger ; and he 
was convinced that the object of his captors was, if they could 
not shoot him, to kill him through scarlet fever. For weeks 
he was daily tortured while in this terrible den by inquisitions 
and threats of immediate execution, alternating with tempt- 
ing offers of large bribes and immediate release if he would 
betray the men who had helped him to reach the Cuban 
lines. He was brought several times before a sort of court- 
martial. Informers proved that they had seen him in places 
that he had never laid eyes on, and, in fact, the indictment of 
high treason was as complete as if he were before a judge and 
jury of another country which need not be named. At the 
same time he was persecuted at night by sentinels with 
loaded muskets, who watched his every movement ; and in 
this way, between sham trials, threats, the daily prospect of 



THE LAND LEAGUE 361 

being shot, and the daily horror of yellow fever, a month 
passed. In time he was removed to another prison, bound 
with ropes as he was conveyed there. In this guise he reached 
Havana, and there again he was incarcerated in a cell— this 
time of such sickening odour that he had to fly continually 
to the grated door in the hope of breathing a little fresh air. 
The removal of the filth to the outside of the entrance, how- 
ever, rendered this impossible, and he had to return in despair 
to his hammock. It was evident that the Spanish authori- 
ties were thoroughly bent on inducing his death from yellow 
fever. He escaped all these perils, however, was sent to 
Spain, and then, through the united efforts of General Sickles, 
Senor Castelar, and Isaac Butt, was set at liberty. 

This episode in Mr. O'Kelly's life was so extraordinary as 
to justify its being told at some length ; and this makes it 
necessary to sketch the remaining events of his career with 
considerable rapidity. His next expedition after the visit to 
Cuba was to Brazil. He returned with the Emperor from 
that country to the United States, and accompanied him 
throughout his entire American tour. During this period, 
O'Kelly performed two sufficiently noteworthy achievements. 
First, he saved the life of the Empress during a collision in 
the Bay of Rio Janeiro : and, secondly, he kept the ruler of 
Brazil safe throughout the whole time from every and any in- 
terviewer, except, of course, that of the ' New York Herald ' ; 
and those who know the irrepressible, irresistible, and relent- 
less nature of the American ' interviewer ' will appreciate how 
much of good management, firmness, and dexterity this 
achievement of O'Kelly implies. Next there came the war 
with ' Sitting Bull ' and the Sioux Indians, an expedition of 
considerable peril, and O'Kelly remained throughout the 
business until ' Sitting Bull ' was driven to take refuge in 
Canada. 

More recently O'Kelly conceived the bold idea of reach- 
ing the Mahdi. The continued obstacles which were placed in 
his way frustrated his object, but he did not abandon his pur- 
pose until he had adopted many expedients of characteristic 
daring and adroitness. The letters which he contributed to 
the ' Daily News ' excited much attention, and were the first 



362 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

to throw any light upon the character and strength of the 
movement under the Mahdi. With singular accuracy he 
pointed out the future of the movement, and sometime later, 
in a series of articles in the ' Freeman's Journal,' on the 
strategy of Lord Wolseley, he forecast the perils and the final 
failure of the campaign with striking truth. He writes with 
the bold, slightly rugged, realistic pen of the special corre- 
spondent diverted to journalism from his true avocation as a 
soldier. 

Shortly before the General Election of 1880, O'Kelly 
returned to Europe, without the least intention of entering 
Parliament. At that time, though he was known to every- 
body acquainted with the inner life of Irish politics, to the 
general public at large he was practically unknown, except as 
the dashing and adventurous special correspondent. And it 
was some surprise when he succeeded in beating down so 
formidable an opponent as The O'Conor Don. And yet, 
thus regarded by the majority of his countrymen as outside 
politics, and remote from its struggles, its aspirations, and its 
shaping, O'Kelly had been a force in fashioning the history 
of his country for many years. In every hour from 1858, 
when while still a boy he first entered upon service, he had 
been dreaming and working for Ireland. When Mr. Butt 
started the Home Rule movement, O'Kelly was one of the 
' extreme men ' who thought that the idiotic and barren con- 
troversy between various forms of legitimate political effort 
should be closed ; the meeting at the Bilton Hotel, at which 
the new movement was practically started, had O'Kelly as 
one of its most active organisers, and he appears among those 
who were present under the name of 'James Martin,' though 
he is not entitled to the ' J. P.' and other distinctions with which 
he is credited in A. M. Sullivan's list in ' New Ireland ' (p. 339), 
who confounded the alias of the revolutionary correspondent 
with a person of the same name. Similarly, at a later period 
in America he was one of the men who refused to sanction a 
spirit of sullen resistance to the efforts which were being 
then started by Mr. Parnell to make constitutional agitation 
a reality, and a Parliamentary party a power. In Parliament, 
too, O'Kelly has, while little known to the public, been one 



THE LAND LEAGUE 363 

of the most potent forces in shaping the fortunes and decisions 
of his party. He has brought to its councils great firmness 
of will, world-wide experience, a common sense which may 
be described as ferocious, and a devotion to the interests of 
his country which is absolute. Though he has given proof 
so abundant of a courage that dares all, O'Kelly's advice has 
always been on the side of well-calculated rather than rash 
courses ; he has, in fact, the true soldier's instinct in favour of 
the adaptation of ways and means to ends, of mathematical 
severity in estimating the strength of the forces for, and of 
the forces against, his own side. He is, like so many men, a 
bundle of contradictions. His whole temperament is revolu- 
tionary ; he chafes under the restraints of Parliamentary life, 
and hates the weary contests of words ; and, on the other 
hand, he insists 011 every step being measured, every move 
calculated. A friend jokingly described him once as the 
'Whig-rebel.' Again, his large experience of life and the 
ruggedness of his sense, give to his thoughts the mould of 
almost cynic realism, and yet he is an idealist of the first 
water ; for throughout his whole life he has held to the idea 
of his country's resurrection with a fanatical faith which no 
danger could terrify, no disaster depress, no labour fatigue. 
And it is as a steady though silent labourer for the elevation 
of his people that O'Kelly would himself wish to be remem- 
bered. ' My best work,' he wrote to a friend, ' was not the 
showy pages which have caught the general eye, but rather 
the quiet political work which I have done for the last twenty 
years. To the mere sabreur's part of my life I attach no im- 
portance whatever, except that within certain limits it has 
furnished me with the opportunity of observing men, and 
acquainting myself with the motive forces which induce men 
to do or not to do.' 

One figure was absent from this gathering which was 
destined to play a prominent part in subsequent struggles. 
This was Mr. John Dillon. Mr. Dillon at this moment 
was absent in America completing the organisation of the 
Land League movement that had been started by Mr. 
Parnell before his departure from that country. Mr. Dillon, 
as so often happens, is the very opposite in appearance and 



364 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

manner from what the readers of his speeches, especially the 
hostile readers, would expect. He came in the course of 
time to be regarded by large sections of the English people 
as the embodiment of everything that was brutal and san- 
guinary in the Irish nature. He was accustomed during the 
fiercer days of the Land League to the most violent denun- 
ciation, and he was daily in receipt of letters of menace or 
of insult. To those who know him this popular image was 
grotesquely inaccurate. Tall, thin, frail, his pliysique is that 
of a man who has periodically to seek flight from death in 
change of scene and of air. His face is long and narrow ; the 
features singularly delicate and refined. Coal-black hair and 
large, dark, tranquil eyes, make up a face that immediately 
arrests attention, and that can never be forgotten. A stranger 
would guess that Mr. Dillon was an artist of the school that 
found delight in painting Madonnas, that spoke of the pur- 
suit of art for art's sake alone, with a sublime unconcern for 
the struggles and aims and welfare of the workaday world. 
A tranquil voice and a gentle manner would further combat 
the idea that this was one of the protagonists in one of the 
fiercest struggles of modern days. The speeches of Mr. 
Dillon are violent in their conclusions only. The proposi- 
tions which startled or shocked unsympathetic hearers are 
reached by him through calculations of apparently mathe- 
matical frigidity, and are delivered in an unimpassioned mono- 
tone. 

John Dillon is the son of Mr. John Blake Dillon, one of 
the bravest and purest spirits in the Young Ireland move- 
ment. His father was one of those who opposed the rising 
to the last moment as imprudent and hopeless, and then was 
among the first to risk liberty and life when it was finally 
resolved upon. John was born in Blackrock, county Dublin, 
in the year 1851. He never went to a boarding-school, and 
probably he owes more of his education to home than to 
other influences. He was mainly instructed in the institu- 
tions connected with the Catholic University : first in the 
University school in Harcourt Street, Dublin, and afterwards 
in the University buildings in Stephen's Green. He was in- 
tended for the medical profession, and passed through the 



THE LAND LEAGUE 365 

course of lectures, and took the degree of Licentiate in the 
College of Surgeons. His entrance into the political struggle 
was not precocious. It was not until after the arrival of 
John Mitchel in Ireland to fight the Tipperary struggle after 
his many years of exile, that Dillon first appeared in the 
political arena. Mitchel had been one of the oldest friends, 
as he had been one of the earliest companions, of his father ; 
and he was among those who went down to Oueenstown to 
bid a welcome to Ireland to the returning and still unre- 
pentant rebel. He then took an active part in the electoral 
contest, and helped to get Mitchel returned. The rise of Mr. 
Parnell and the active policy brought Mr. Dillon more pro- 
minently to the front. He was one of the first to appreciate 
correctly the new policy, and to see the road to salvation to 
which it pointed the way. At once he became an eager 
advocate of Mr. Parnell and his policy. This brought him 
into direct collision with Mr. Isaac Butt, and his was the 
fiercest and most damaging speech made against the old 
leader in the Molesworth Hall meeting, at which Butt made 
his last political speech. When the Land League move- 
ment was started, Dillon at once threw himself into the agita- 
tion, and was appointed to accompany Mr. Parnell upon his 
historic visit to America. 

There were many other members at the meeting in the 
City Hall whose history would throw light upon the circum- 
stances and tendencies of Irish life, social and political, but I 
have not space to give them more than a few passing words. 
Richard Power, who was elected in 1874, when he was barely 
of age, is a member of a Waterford family which has played 
a prominent and often a romantic part in Irish history for 
centuries. Mr. Edmund Leamy was one of the men whose 
vote was considered most doubtful in the coming struggle 
between Mr. Shaw and Mr. Parnell. In fact, in the list which 
Mr. Parnell had in his hands, the name of Leamy appeared 
amongst the names of certain opponents. He was entirely 
unknown to Mr. Parnell as well as to everyone else in the 
room except those who came from Waterford, and he was 
supposed to be one of the men who had won his election 
on a purely personal issue, and, it was inferred, for purely 



366 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

personal purposes. Mr. Parnell and his colleagues now re- 
member these grotesque misapprehensions of Leamy's antece- 
dents and character with amusement. Edmund Leamy was 
born in Waterford on Christmas Day 1848. Waterford is one 
of the towns which, amid the terrible eclipse over the rest of 
Ireland, shone out with something of a national spirit. This 
was probably due largely to the fact that it is the native town 
of Thomas Francis Meagher. Waterford, too, is a town of 
historic monuments speaking of an age and of a history that 
had its glories long before the English set their feet on Irish 
shores. On its quay stands Reginald's Tower, erected by the 
Danish king in 1 102 ; and in tracing the influences of his own 
political history, Leamy always dwells upon this and like 
memorials as inspiring him with his passionate love of his 
country, and his hope in her future. Another influence that 
made a political combatant in the national ranks was the 
companionship of Thomas Sexton. He was a colleague of 
Sexton's in the Waterford Young Men's Society, and it was 
Sexton who first pressed him into the young debates of that 
body. When the election of 1874 came, he was an appren- 
tice in a solicitor's office ; but the ardour of the struggle 
between Richard Power and Major O'Gorman as the repre- 
sentatives of the new Home Rule movement, and Mr. Gibson 
(now Lord Ashbourne), Mr. Bernal Osborne, and Mr. Dela- 
hunty, as representatives of effete and anti-national creeds, 
brought him out from his desk. He addressed several meet- 
ings with an effect probably more startling to himself than to 
anybody else, and his delighted townsmen declared that the 
traditions of Meagher were not dead ; and one prophetic but 
grimy-faced labourer declared that he would yet be member 
for the city. In 1880 Major O'Gorman was again a candi- 
date. He came into collision with some local feeling, the 
details of which it would be needless to go into. Leamy was 
put forward by one section of the constituency, and was re- 
turned. There is no man in the party whose real abilities 
and services bear so little resemblance to his public reputa- 
tion. A touch of the Paddy-go-aisy spirit, a curious love for 
self-effacement, have hidden him from public view ; but to 
his colleagues he is known as having one of the keenest and 



THE LAND LEAGUE 367 

most original intellects, and one of the most stirring tongues 
of the Irish party. 

Richard Lalor, one of the members for Queen's County, 
represented a family ancient in Irish struggle. His father 
was one of the fierce spirits that led the movement against 
the tithes, and for many years was the foremost man in every 
political effort in the Queen's County. James Finton Lalor, 
his brother, was perhaps the most truly revolutionary tempera- 
ment of '48. He lives again in the pages of Duffy, 1 and he 
it was who suggested to Mitchel the No Rent movement, 
which Mitchel is alleged to have spoiled, and which for the 
first time was carried into effect more than a quarter of a 
century after Finton Lalor's fiery and restless spirit had 
passed to rest. Another brother who sought a home in 
Australia was the leader in a small insurrection at Ballarat, 
and there lost an arm. When the reforms he fought for were 
granted he became one of the rulers of the country, and is 
now Speaker of the Victorian Parliament. Richard Lalor 
is of the same stern spirit as all his stock. To-day he is a 
feeble and bent man with wearied eyes and a thin voice, and 
a constant prey to ill- health, but his spirit is exactly the 
same as in his hot youth. In 1848 he had his pike and his 
thousands of pikemen ready for action ; to-day, as then, he 
is the unconquerable and irreclaimable rebel — the Blanqui of 
Irish politics. 

The O'Gorman Mahon, to whom was entrusted the duty 
of proposing the name of Mr. Parnell, belongs to even an 
older agitation. Tall, erect as a pine, with huge masses of 
perfectly white hair and a leonine face, he is the majestic relic 
of a stormy and glorious youth. He is the last survivor of 
the once multitudinous race of the Irish gentleman, as ready 
with his pistol as with his tongue. Nobody can enumerate the 
number of times he has been ' out,' and the still larger number 
of occasions in which he despatched or received the cartel. A 
man of the spirit of The O'Gorman Mahon was necessary in 
such times as those of his youth. The Irish Catholic was still 
an unemancipated serf, and the Lords of Ascendency looked 

1 See Four Years of Irish History, ' A new Tribune, a new Policy,' pp. 464 . 
532. 



368 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

down upon him with the contempt of centuries of unbroken 
sway. It was at such a time that the swaggering adherent of 
English domination had to be met by a representative of the 
ancient faith and of the hidden longings of the oppressed 
majority, before whose eagle-eye privilege had to quail. 
O'Connell was the tongue, but The O'Gorman Mahon was the 
sword, of the Irish Democracy rising against its oppressors after 
its centuries of bondage ; and so he did his own useful work 
in his own day. There was something strangely picturesque in 
the appearance in that group of young men engaged in a still 
infant movement of a man who had stood by the side of 
O'Connell at the Clare election which won Catholic emanci- 
pation. It was almost as if Thomas Jefferson were to rise 
and with the same pen that had written the Declaration of 
Independence to join in the composition of Abraham Lincoln's 
proclamation against slavery. In the years that had passed 
since that day The O'Gorman Mahon had gone through a life 
of strange and varied adventure. When, in the whirligig of 
time, he was thrust from Irish politics, he had gone to South 
America, and there had taken part in the struggles of the 
young Republic for emancipation. Returning to his native 
land, he found Isaac Butt starting the new movement for 
Home Rule. Several constituencies competed for him, but 
he had chosen the historic county in whose history he had 
played so prominent a part. 

Garret Byrne, member for Wicklow, is in direct descent 
from Garret Byrne who was hanged in the Rebellion of '48. 
John Barry, his colleague, beginning life at almost its hum- 
blest rung, had become an important member in a Scotch 
manufacturing firm, and shortly afterwards was in business 
for himself. He had also taken a share in political struggles 
the history of which has yet to be told. Mr. Corbet was a 
member of an ancient Irish family, and a man himself of 
culture and of considerable literary power. 
\- Charles Dawson was born in Limerick in 1842. He had 
led a life of keen activity before his entrance into Parliament. 
Brought up in the Catholic University side by side with John 
Dillon, he had early taken an interest in the politics of his 
country, and had been one of Butt's greatest favourites. In 



THE LAND LEAGUE 369 

time, like all the other young men, he found himself forced to 
accept the new policy. For years he had taken sleepless 
interest in the franchise question, preached about it in season 
and out of season years before anybody regarded it as a ques- 
tion worth discussing. It is to him, almost more than to any 
other Irishman, the final triumph of that act of emancipation 
is due. Mr. R. H. Metge, like Mr. Parnell, was a landed pro- 
prietor of considerable means and of the Protestant faith, and 
his keen sympathy with the oppressed had thrown him into 
the popular ranks. The Rev. Isaac Nelson was not present 
at this meeting, but a short time afterwards he was elected for 
Mayo ; and this election of a Presbyterian minister by the 
most Catholic county in Ireland was held up by the friends 
of religious liberty as another proof of religious toleration on 
the part of the Irish people. 

Mr. Marum, another landed proprietor, comes from a 
family which has played an important and sometimes a tragic 
part in the Irish land struggle. His grandfather was mur- 
dered, and several men were hanged for the crime. Mr. 
Marum himself, on the other hand, has been a lifelong friend 
of the tenantry. 

One more figure requires description. On the first day of 
the meeting of the Irish party the chair was occupied by the 
Lord Mayor of Dublin— Mr. E. Dwyer Gray, M.P. for the 
county Carlow. Mr. Gray is the son of the late Sir John Gray, 
whose name has figured so frequently in preceding pages. He 
was born in the year 1 846. Brought up from his earliest youth 
in the opinions of his father, whose favourite son he was, he 
attained at an early age a correct judgment of political affairs. 
His father had received many bitter lessons during a long 
political career. One story he was never tired of repeating 
to his son. It was of a man who offered to him, during the 
Young Ireland excitement, a plan of the defences of Dublin 
Castle. Gray treated the offer of the surrender of the Lord- 
Lieutenant's citadel with suspicion, and a few days afterwards 
was not surprised to find that the would-be traitor was a 
police spy in disguise. The mind of the son is even clearer 
than that of his father, and refuses steadily to accept any 
■doctrine or course until it has been fully thought out. In 



37o THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

this way Gray has sometimes been regarded as backward 
when he was simply demanding the full reason for the prof- 
fered policy, and had not yet been able to see its eventual 
outlet. He succeeded his father in the management of the 
' Freeman's Journal/ the chief newspaper of Ireland, and soon 
raised it to double its previous circulation. Becoming a 
member of the Dublin Corporation, of which his father had 
been the guiding star for many years, he soon attained to the 
position of its leading figure, and took a keen interest in 
advancing the hygienic improvements of the city. At this 
period he was Lord Mayor, and had under his control vast 
sums which had been subscribed to the Mansion House for 
the relief of distress. Anticipating a little, Gray subsequently 
came into fierce collision with James Carey, whom he ex- 
posed for an attempted fraud upon the Corporation, and 
Carey from that day was his bitter and relentless enemy. 
Gray had been returned to the House of Commons shortly 
after the death of his father, and though not a frequent, was. 
already, as he is still, one of its most influential debaters. 
There is no man in the Irish party, and few outside it, who 
can state a case with such pellucid clearness. When Gray 
has completed his statement the whole facts are as clear to 
the minds of his hearers as they have already been to his own 
searching intellect. 

The great question to be decided at this meeting was the 
future leadership of the party. It was, doubtless, assumed by 
the friends of Mr. Shaw, and probably by the country after- 
wards, that the Parnellites had come to this meeting with a 
cut-and-dried scheme in their hands. Nothing could be 
farther from the truth. Up to a few days before the meeting 
there was practically no intention even of proposing Mr. 
Parnell as a leader. The idea never even assumed shape 
until the night before the meeting in the City Hall. There 
happened to be stopping at the Imperial Hotel several 
gentlemen who had been returned or had resolved to support 
Mr. Parnell's policy. Among them they discussed the question 
of leadership. The gentlemen who took part in this informal 
and accidental conference were Mr. John Barry, Mr. Richard 
Lalor Mr. O'Kelly, Dr. Commins, Mr. Biggar, Mr. T. P. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 371 

O'Connor, and, strangely enough, Mr. McCoan ; Mr. Healy, 
who had not yet been elected a member of Parliament, was 
also present. 

Mr. Parnell had no warmer supporters or more devoted 
friends than some of the gentlemen who took part in this dis- 
cussion, but even some of these were doubtful as to the 
prudence of the proposal that he should be leader. Up to 
that period Mr. Parnell was supposed to have given no sign 
of definite aims or a broad and statesmanlike capacity. He 
had given abundant proof of inflexible courage and deter- 
mination, but some of the very occasions on which he had 
exhibited these qualities suggested doubts as to whether he 
was a man who always knew where he was going. One of 
the shrewdest members of his party — a gentleman who was 
not present at this conference— said about this period that he 
never could see in Parnell any plan beyond that of ' making 
a row ; ' and ability ' to make a row,' after all, is not a com- 
plete stock-in-trade for a political leader. The idea of some 
of these gentlemen was that it would be far better, under the 
circumstances, to allow Mr. Parnell to remain in his old posi- 
tion as a guerilla leader, with a safer and steadier man as 
nominally in chief command. Curiously enough, the most 
earnest and eager in the demand for the leadership of Mr. 
Parnell was Mr. McCoan. 

At last there was an understanding rather than a formal 
resolution among these gentlemen, that they would propose 
Mr. Parnell as leader. He himself did not come to Dublin 
until next morning ; some gentlemen went to his hotel and 
others met him on his way to the City Hall. In his bed- 
room and afterwards as he passed through the streets 
mention was made to him of the suggestion that had been 
made at the informal meeting of the previous night. Pie 
neither rejected nor encouraged the idea, but seemed, on 
the whole, rather inclined to the notion, in case Mr. Shaw 
were displaced, of proposing that the office should be held by 
Mr. Justin McCarthy. This was the state of things when the 
meeting assembled. No plans were formed and nothing 
whatever was known as to the outcome ; nor was there 
means of forming such plans in the progress of the meeting. 



372 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Mr. Parnell did not know the views of many of those present. 
Most of them, too, were strangers to each other ; did not 
even know each other's names, and had not, in most cases 
even exchanged a word. Lists were drawn up as to how the 
vote would go, and in the list of Mr. Parnell several gentle- 
men had to be put down as of unknown tendencies who at 
the time were already fierce and fervid Parnellites. When 
the division came, therefore, nobody had the least idea as to 
what the result would be. The vote was : for Mr. Parnell, 
23 ; for Mr. Shaw, 18. 1 Mr. Shaw apparently received his 
defeat at the moment with good humour, but when, the 
next day, the party formulated its policy and declared in 
favour of Peasant Proprietary as the final solution of the Land 
question, Mr. Shaw already indicated a certain difference 
from Mr. Parnell and his friends. 

When the party came over to London the first occasion 
arose for the two sections taking opposite sides. It was on 
a seemingly trivial question. The point at issue was the part 
of the House in which the Irish members should take their 
seats. In the view of Mr. Shaw and his friends, the existing 
Ministry was so friendly to Ireland that the Irish party should 
signify their general adherence by sitting on the same side of 
the House. The supporters of Mr. Parnell maintained that 
even between a friendly Liberal Ministry and an Irish 
National party there was irreconcilable difference on the 
Irish National question and on several others. They 
held that the only hope of a satisfactory solution of the 
Irish question was that Irish members should maintain a 
position of absolute independence of the English parties, 
that therefore the attitude of Irish Nationalists was one of 
permanent opposition to all English administrations, and 
that this political attitude should be signified by their con- 
tinuing to keep their seats on the Opposition side of the 

1 The members on both sides were :— For Mr. Parnell— Sexton, Arthur 
O'Connor, O 'Kelly, Byrne, Barry, McCarthy, Biggar, T. P. O Connor, Lalor, 
T. D. Sullivan, Commins, Gill, Dawson, Leamy, Corbet, McCoan, Finigan, 
Daly, Marum, W. H. O'Sullivan, J. Leahy, O'Gorman Mahon, and O'Shea. 
For Mr. Shaw — Macfarlane, Brooks, Colthurst, Synan, Sir P. O'Brien, Foley, 
Smithwick, Fay, Errington, Gabbett, Smyth, R. Power, Blake, McKenna, 
P. Martin, Meldon, Callan, and Gray. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 373 

House. Subsequent events brought out more clearly the 
grave issues which underlay this apparently small difference. 
The friendliness to the existing Administration which sitting 
among them expressed was afterwards translated by the 
followers of Mr. Shaw into a greater regard for the interests 
of the Ministry than for the crying demands of Ireland — into 
the subservience of Irish National to English Liberal aims 
and methods, and, ultimately, into a readiness on the part of 
most of these gentlemen to give a final testimony of their 
faith in the Ministry either by a search for or an acceptance 
of paid office. 

Meantime, in Ireland, the Land question was reaching a 
crisis. The increase of evictions, which had begun with 1877 
—the first year of the distress — showed still further signs of 
increase : the number of tenantry unable to meet their rents 
was reaching daily larger proportions, and the Relief Com- 
mittee had on their rolls something like 500,000 recipients of 
charity. Side by side with all this the Land League was 
daily advancing with gigantic strides, and every week was 
receiving a vast impetus through the immense subscriptions 
sent from America. It was clear that the time had come 
when Ireland must make a tremendous step either of advance 
or retrogression. Either distress was to develop into famine 
and famine to lead to wholesale eviction, and another lease 
of landlord power and oppression, or the Irish people were to 
throw off the chains of centuries, to revolt against the per- 
petuation of their miseries and of their servitude, and to dash 
forward in an effort for a new and a better era. 

Such was the state of Ireland, and such the position of 
the Irish party, when Parliament met in 1880. But how was 
it with the Ministry ? The Irish members had no means of 
finding an answer to that question at that particular period, 
but we have since received abundant evidence upon the sub- 
ject, and all that evidence is conclusive that the Ministry were 
blind and deaf to all the signs of the times in Ireland. They 
did not know the existence of the distress, they did not know 
the strength of the agitation, they were far more ignorant of 
the condition of the island than of countries separated by 
thousands of miles on land or by sea ; above all things, they 



374 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

had no idea whatever of making an attempt to deal with the 
Land question. 

The first witness of the state of feeling among the Ministry 
is the Duke of Argyll, who, speaking in 1881, said : 

The present Government was formed with no expressed inten- 
tion of bringing in another great Irish Land Bill ... it formed no 
part of the programme upon which the Government was formed. 
Perhaps no Government was ever formed on a greater or wider 
programme, if we are to take the speeches of my right hon. friend 
the Prime Minister in the course of the Midlothian campaign as 
the programme of the Government ; but, so far as I recollect and 
am concerned, it was not intimated in those speeches that it was the 
intention of the Government to unsettle the settlement of the Land 
Act of 1870. 1 

In the session of 1880 the Marquis of Hartington showed 
that his mind was not only not made up in favour of Land 
reform in Ireland, but that he was, on the whole, rather 
antagonistic to any such reform. 

He was speaking in reply to a motion of Mr. Justin 
McCarthy that a tenant farmer should be added to the Com- 
mission of Inquiry into the Land question. Several of the 
Irish members had spoken of the Land Act of 1870 as an 
absolute failure ; and had taken it for granted that the 
Ministry had made up their minds that another and a larger 
Land Act was required. Thus Lord Hartington rebuked 
them : — 

The Marquis of Hartington said he was not surprised that the 
hon. member for Tralee (The O'Donoghue) objected to the compo- 
sition of the Commission, seeing that with him the failure of the 
Land Act was a foregone conclusion. To some minds the conclusion 
was not so absolutely certain that the Land Act had failed, or that it 
had not, and it was in solving that question that the Commission 
was expected to be useful. The speeches attacking the Commission 
had all been pervaded by a fallacious supposition — namely, that the 
Government looked to Baron Dowse and the other members of the 
Commission for a comprehensive scheme of land reform. . . . What 
they wanted was facts. In the last four years there had been almost 
continuous debates on the Irish Land question. . . . The result was 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxii. pp. 1754, 1755. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 375 

that neither the House nor the Government could arrive at any 
certain conclusion on the matter. What could be more advisable 
under these circumstances than to ask a set of honest and impartial 
men to make inquiry on the spot, and to report the facts brought 
under their notice? That was the object of the Commission, and 
not, as the hon. member for Longford (Mr. Justin M'Carthy) seemed 
to suppose, the elaboration of a comprehensive scheme of land 
reform. l 

The chief and most significant testimony of the mind of 
the Ministry at this period is that given by Mr. Gladstone him- 
self. During his visit to Midlothian in the autumn of 1884 
he made one of those extraordinary confessions which strew 
his career : — 

I must say (he declared during his Midlothian campaign in 1884) 
one word more upon, I might say, a still more important subject — the 
subject of Ireland. It did not enter into my address to you, for what 
reason I know not ; but the Government that was then in power, rather, 
I think, kept back from Parliament, certainly were not forward to lay 
before Parliament, what was going on in Ireland until the day of the 
Dissolution came, and the address of Lord Beaconsfield was published 
in undoubtedly very imposing terms. ... I frankly admit that I had 
had much upon my hand's connected with the doings of that Govern- 
ment in almost every quarter of the world, and I did not know — no 
one knew — the severity of the crisis that was already swelling upon 
the horizon, and that shortly after rushed upon us like a flood. 2 

Such, then, was the condition of the problem presented to 
Mr. Parnell and his followers. In their own country thousands 
of people face to face with starvation ; land tenure still in 
such a position that the tenant had no protection from rack- 
rent and from eviction, and therefore from periodic famine ; 
an agitation rising daily in passion and in strength ; the hour 
demanding revolutionary land reform ; and the mind of the 
Ministry either blank or hostile. 

This contradiction between the demands of the Irish ques- 
tion and the resolves of the Government is a central fact in 
all that follows. It will justify to any candid man measures 
which at the time appeared uncalled for and extreme ; and, 

1 Hansard, vol. cclv. pp. 1415 16. 
8 Times, September 2, 1884. 



376 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

above all things, it will explain how it was that the Parnellites 
were driven at the very outset of the session of 1880 into 
an attitude of hostility to a Ministry that was Liberal and 
professed to be friendly. 

The Queen's Speech was soon to give evidence of the un- 
mistakable ignorance and unreadiness of the Government. 
It was of considerable length ; it dealt with Turkey, and 
Afghanistan, and India, and South Africa ; but it contained 
not one word about the Irish Land question. 

Immediately after the reading of the Royal Address the 
Irish members retired to the dingy rooms in King Street, 
Westminster, which were then their offices. The recruits 
were perfectly unable at that period to correctly appreciate 
the situation, but to Mr. Parnell and the others who had 
stood by his side the position was clear. The omission of 
all mention of the Irish Land question was pointed out with 
indignant surprise, and it was immediately resolved that the 
moment the House reassembled, the Irish members should 
take action by at cnce giving notice of an amendment to the 
Queen's Speech. Neither the Irish members nor anybody 
else grasped the significance, or could have told the widespread 
and momentous consequences, which resulted from this 
amendment. But to anybody, however, now looking back 
over the history of this period, it will be perfectly clear that 
the amendment to the Queen's Speech in 1880 was the germ 
which afterwards was transformed into the Land Act of 1881. 

It was in the views which were developed on the necessity 
of proposing this amendment that the symptoms were to be 
seen of the divergence of opinion which made the cohesion 
of the then Irish party an impossibility. The section led by 
Mr. Shaw had much to say in favour of the difficulties of the 
Government, and could urge with some justice that it was un- 
fair to demand immediate treatment from the Ministry of a 
question of such vast importance and such extraordinary 
complexity as the Irish Land question. Then the time at 
the disposal of the Government was short, and they had a 
terrible account to settle in the legacies left to them by their 
predecessors before they could approach new tasks. The 
section led by Mr. Parnell, on the other hand, pointed out 



THE LAND LEAGUE 377 

that the Irish Land question had already reached a stage 
when further delay meant wholesale destruction ; showed how 
long and patient had already been the endurance of the post- 
ponement of the land settlement by their constituents ; and, 
above all, urged that the primary consideration of a National 
party was the need of the Irish people, and not the fortunes 
of an English Ministry. If the Irish demand were allowed 
to occupy a second and subsidiary place ; if that demand 
were made dependent upon the convenience of the Ministry, 
it was held by Mr. Parnell and his followers that the cause. 
would be lost. Events justified to every impartial mind 
the justice of these views, and the peril of subordinating 
Irish national interests to those of an English Ministry has 
been emphasised by the transformation of the moderate 
section of the Home Rulers one by one into office-holders or 
office-seekers, or mere drudges to Ministerial demands. 

The amendment was brought forward on the reassembling 
of the House after the interval which follows the reading of 
the Queen's Speech. It was in these words : — 

And to humbly assure Her Majesty that the important and press- 
ing question of the occupiers and cultivators of the land in Ireland 
deserves the most serious and immediate attention of Her Majesty's 
Government with a view to the introduction of such legislation as. 
will secure to these classes the legitimate fruits of their industry. 

It was on the night when this amendment was brought 
forward that Mr. Parnell spoke for the first time in Parliament 
since he had reached his new position. He rose about eleven 
o'clock ; the House was crowded and eager ; and when the 
Speaker called out the name of the member for Cork there 
was a movement of keen interest, and in the galleries reserved 
to strangers almost everybody got up to have a look at the 
new Irish leader. Mr. Parnell spoke briefly, but with vehe- 
mence and force. He drew a rapid picture of the state of 
things in Ireland, which was listened to with more curiosity 
than sympathy, and the general result (so far as the present 
writer can recollect) of the incident was that Mr. Parnell was 
estimated as a very violent and rather irrational man, who 
represented nothing but a small and irresponsible knot of 



378 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

senseless irreconcilables. The attitude of the House to Mr. 
Shaw was very different. He himself seemed to challenge 
comparison with his successor, for the moment Mr. Parnell 
sat down, Mr. Shaw rose. The first and most significant 
fact was that the two men spoke from different parts of 
the House. Mr. Parnell had risen from a seat below the 
gangway on the Opposition side. Mr. Shaw spoke from the 
very bosom of the Radical section, and when he rose he was 
rewarded with a burst of hearty cheers from all the Liberal 
benches. He spoke in the style that is now so well known ; 
his speech gave a great deal of satisfaction, and the opinion 
was freely expressed by the English members that his remarks 
were in welcome contrast to the heat and exaggeration of 
Mr. Parnell. The contest between the two men was still held 
to be undecided. There was much contempt for the group of 
young men who formed Mr. Parnell's chief support, and the 
expectation was universal that Mr. Parnell's tenure of office 
would be brief and inglorious. The appearance of the two 
men in the debate strengthened this conviction in the English 
mind, and English members might be heard to comment 
with cheerfulness that Parnell might be a dashing guerillero, 
but Shaw was the sagacious statesman and the real leader. 

But the Ministry and the House of Commons were soon to 
find that, however much Mr. Shaw's methods might be more 
agreeable than those of Mr. Parnell, it was with Parnell and 
his colleagues that they had to count. Mr. Parnell had de- 
clared in his speech on the first working night of the 
session that he trembled to think of what the consequences 
might be if the Government gave the aid of their soldiers and 
their police to the landlords who were determined to take ad- 
vantage of the widespread distress in Ireland and push on 
evictions at a disastrous rate. This declaration against the 
employment of the soldiers and police for the purposes of 
eviction had not attracted much attention on the part of the 
Government. Confident in the magnificence of their recent 
victory, in the still verdant and unbroken strength of their 
party, and in the loftiness of their hopes, they could not under- 
stand their path being crossed by the then insignificant section 
of the House. Between them and the Irish party open war 



THE LAND LEAGUE 379 

had not been declared, and its possibility would not be even 
contemplated, especially by men who had given such repeated 
assurances of their sympathy for Ireland as Mr. Gladstone 
and Mr. Bright. The Liberal ministers and the followers of 
Mr. Parnell were at that stage in which it was yet undecided 
whether doubting affection would end in closer bonds or in 
permanent estrangement ; but, meantime, Mr. Parnell and his 
friends contemplated a second move. The great object at 
that time was to stay the hand of the landlord, made omnipo- 
tent over the tenantry by the failure of the crops ; and to 
meet this emergency the Irish party brought in the Suspen- 
sion of Evictions Bill. This measure, like Mr. Parnell's 
speech, received comparatively little attention, and was allowed 
to proceed on its course without any ' blocking ' motion. The 
truth was that the members of the new Parliament had not 
yet settled down to their work, had not learned the arts and 
machinery of parliamentary warfare, and Mr. Warton had not 
shown his portentous shape on the parliamentary horizon. 
The result was that the second reading of the Suspension of 
Evictions Bill came on at two o'clock one fine morning, to 
the horror and surprise of the Treasury bench. There have 
been many scenes since that morning in which the Irish party 
have appeared to advantage, but the writer never remembers 
•an occasion which has left a more lasting and more agreeable 
impression upon his mind than the appearance of the Irish 
members at that sitting. For the first time the Irish party 
Avas in strength ; nearly forty of them were present, and they 
completely filled two of the benches below the gangway, and 
anybody who looked at their faces could see that they had 
braced themselves for a struggle, and really meant business. 
This certainly was the impression made upon Mr. Gladstone. 
He looked up from the paper on which he was writing his 
nightly report of parliamentary proceedings to the Queen, with 
a gaze first of pained amazement and then of pathetic appeal 
to the serried and resolute ranks opposite him. But the Irish- 
men, who had to think of hundreds of thousands of other faces 
that looked to their inner minds with hungry hope from 
cabin and field, had their advantage, were determined to hold 
to it, and declared that the discussion of the Bill must go on. 



3So THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The Premier yielded to the inevitable, made the important 
announcement that the Government themselves would con- 
sider the subject raised by Mr. Parnell's measure, and so the 
Irish Land question, which but a few days before had been 
scouted out of court, which had never been mentioned at the 
first Cabinet Council, of whose existence the Queen's Speech 
knew absolutely nothing, had already within a couple of weeks 
after the meeting of Parliament been taken up by the Govern- 
ment as one of the chief and primary questions of the session ; 
and the starving tenants, just emerging from famine, might 
hope that the landlords would not be allowed to. work un- 
checked their wicked will. This, in fact, was the first parlia- 
mentary victory that the Land League gained. 

The Government, of course, did their best to minimise the 
amount of the concession they had made, and it was for 
this reason that they adopted the expedient of making their 
provision for dealing with impending evictions a clause in the 
Relief of Distress Bill — a complementary part of the extra- 
ordinary statute introduced by the preceding Government. 
But Mr. Chaplin defeated this attempt on a point of order, 
which the Speaker held to be good, and the Government had 
to show their hands and avow their purposes, and so the 
famous Disturbance Bill was introduced. The Disturbance 
Bill of Mr. Forster was the Suspension of Evictions Bill of 
Mr. Parnell under another name. The Parnellites, so far, had 
gained their point, but they were to reap still further advan- 
tage. The speakers for the Government had, of course, to 
array the terrible figures of eviction increasing with dis- 
tress, 1 to make strong speeches and urge powerful reasons 
in favour of a measure which went counter to so many of the 
prejudices of the House of Commons. Irish distress thus be- 
came the cry of an English as well as of an Irish party, and 
striking statements and valuable admissions were made which 

1 If we look to the total numbers we find that in 1878 there were 1,749 
evictions ; in 1S79, 2,607 > an d as was shown by my right hon. and learned friend, 
1,690 in the five and a half months of this year — showing a further increase upon 
the enormous increase of last year, and showing, in fact, unless it be checked, that 
15,000 individuals will be ejected from their homes, without hope, without 
remedy, in the course of the present year. — Mr. Gladstone, Hansard, vol. ccliii. 
p. 1666. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 381 

justified the whole position of the Land League. For in- 
stance, it was during a debate on the Disturbance Bill that 
Mr. Gladstone committed himself to the famous doctrine 
that, in the circumstances of distress in which Ireland then 
was, a sentence of eviction might be regarded as equiva- 
lent to a sentence of death ; 1 and it was this and suchlike 
expressions of opinion that long paralysed the hand of the 
Government against the Land League agitation. However 
great had been their triumph, the Parnellites did not relax 
their vigilance, and when on one or two occasions the Govern- 
ment yielded to the Tory opposition, and introduced damag- 
ing amendments, they were brought to such stern account 
that they hesitated before taking any such course again. It 
is not necessary to trace here the chequered course of the 
Disturbance Bill. Everybody knows that it was fiercely 
opposed stage after stage by the Tories in the House of Com- 
mons, that it was finally carried by overwhelming majorities, 
and that, when it went to the House of Lords, it was thrown 
out with every circumstance of ignominy and contempt. 

This ending to the business placed both the Government 
and the Irish party in a strange and difficult position. It had 
been stated by Mr. Gladstone that a sentence of eviction was 
equivalent to a sentence of death, and the equally significant 
and appalling statement had been added by him that, accord- 
ing to the statistics supplied by the Irish authorities, 15,000 
persons were to receive the sentence of eviction within that 
single year. The time that has elapsed since 1880 enables 
us to form a correct view of the state of things really existing 
in that year, and we are able to see that the tendency of even 
popular speakers was to underrate rather than exaggerate the 
perils of the situation. Again let me put forward the central 

1 In the failure of the crops, crowned by the year 1879, the act of God had 
replaced the Irish occupier in the condition in which he stood before the Land 
Act. Because what had he to contemplate ? He had to contemplate eviction for 
his non-payment of rent : and as a consequence of eviction, starvation. And 
. . . it. is no exaggera'ion to say, in a country where the agricultural pursuit 
is the only pursuit, and where the means of the payment of rent are entirely 
destroyed for a time by the visitation of Providence, that the poor occupier may 
under these circumstances regard a sentence of eviction as coming, for him, very 
near to a sentence of death. — Hansard, vol. ccliii. p. 1663. 



382 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

positions of the part of the Land Leaguers, (i) That there 
had been distress so widespread and severe as to threaten 
famine : nobody contests that position now. (2) That the 
tenants were in most cases rack-rented : the decisions of the 
Land Court have given the seal of judicial tribunals to this 
contention. (3) That a vast number of the tenants were so 
burdened with the arrears of rack-rent as to be absolutely at 
the mercy of the landlords ; and the Arrears Act is a fraud 
and the hundreds of landlords who joined in its application 
are swindlers, if this statement be not true. (4) That the 
remedy required for the relief of the Irish tenant was a radical 
and drastic, and not a petty and moderate remedy ; and who 
would describe Mr. Gladstone's Land Act of 1881 as petty 
and moderate rather than radical and drastic? But, though 
every single position of the Land Leaguers has been justified 
by events, and finds itself imbedded in the admissions of 
English ministers and the enactments of the Imperial Parlia- 
ment, things were in a different position in 1880, and there 
was scarcely one of their statements that was not met with 
fierce and coarse denial. 

And, on the other side, the situation was one of extreme 
perplexity. Every one of the positions taken up by the 
Parnellites the Ministry adopted, as was shown by the intro- 
duction of the Suspension of Evictions Bill and by their 
speeches in its support. The reality of the dangers to the 
peace of Ireland Mr. Forster was himself foremost in 
acknowledging ; and were they then to allow Ireland to drift 
unhelmed — or, to use Mr. Gladstone's own words, ' without 
hope and without remedy ' — to the abyss of wholesale evic- 
tion, tempered by wholesale assassination, towards which the 
action of the House of Lords had pushed it ? It is hard at 
this moment to say what the Government could have done. 
They had just come from the country with a triumphant 
majority. Was it in political human nature that they should 
risk this majority by another appeal to the country within 
a few months, and before they had fulfilled a single item in 
the vast programme they had set before them ? It was reported 
at the time that the Earl of Beaconsfield had pointed out to 
his dispirited followers what he described as the unscrupulous 



THE LAND LEAGUE 383 

tactics of Mr. Gladstone and of the Radical wing of the Liberal 
party, and that these tactics justified the Opposition in exhaust- 
ing every effort to drive the Ministry from office at the 
earliest possible moment. The rejection of the Compensation 
for Disturbance Bill had been the first blow, and undoubtedly 
the blow had been well directed. A Ministry and a Parlia- 
ment that seemed omnipotent had, at one stroke, been brought 
before the world and before its own consciousness as ab- 
solutely impotent. The prestige of overwhelming victory was 
already gone, the bright hopes of noble achievements were 
already blasted, and the Parliament of Mr. Gladstone, in the 
very hour of its robust youth, was now stricken with the 
palsied spirit of self-distrustful age. It was quite possible, 
under these circumstances, that if the Ministry had appealed 
to the country the response might have been, if not wholly, 
at least materially different from that of the General Election 
of a few months ago. The Ministry might have been greatly 
weakened, and the mighty weapon for the repair of past 
Conservative errors and for future Liberal conquest might 
have been returned to the hand of Mr. Gladstone pointless 
and broken. The truth is, the difficulty of the situation was 
the permanent and incurable difficulty of the present parlia- 
mentary relations of England and of Ireland ; it was the 
difficulty of having to govern one country through the public 
opinion of another. An Irish minister face to face with such 
a crisis could with confidence have appealed against a verdict 
so plainly hostile to the interests of Ireland as the rejection of 
the Suspension of Evictions Bill with the full knowledge that 
the public opinion of his own people, at once sympathetic and 
informed, would have redoubled his power of meeting so 
portentous an emergency. But the English minister had to 
appeal to a public almost entirely ignorant of the merits 
of the controversy, and fickle in its sympathies because of 
ignorance. 

But there was one step which might have been taken 
and which might have resulted in some good. It appeared, 
too, that the Irish people could rely upon this step being 
taken. On August 24 Mr. Forster made an important state- 
ment. 



384 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

He had always said they must carry out the law ; but he must 
also repeat that, if they found, as they had not within the last two or 
three weeks -found, and as they hoped they would not find, that the 
landlords of Ireland were to any great extent making use of their 
powers so as to force the Government to support them in the exer- 
cise of injustice, the Government should accompany any request for 
special powers with a Bill which would prevent the Government from 
being obliged to support injustice. He would go further and say, 
under any circumstances if it was found that injustice and tyranny 
were largely committed — although he did not believe that such would 
be the case — it would then be their serious duty to consider what 
their action should be, and he did not think that any man in the 
House would expect him to remain any longer the instrument of that 
injustice. 1 

Here was some promise of a break in the run of disaster 
which now menaced Ireland. The landlords might evict on 
a wholesale scale, and all their history down to that very- 
year pointed to their making full and savage use of every 
power which the law and the seasons had placed in their hands ; 
but if a Minister of the Crown, rather than carry on this law, 
were to resign his office, the public opinion of the country 
would necessarily be fixed upon the difficulties and the horrors 
of the problem ; and the Ministry, with such a force behind 
them, would have been able to dictate to the House of Lords 
a prompt and complete remedy. But many days had not 
elapsed when this hope disappeared. A cold fit had super- 
vened with extraordinary rapidity the outburst of angry and 
worthy resolve, and Mr. Forster, catechised by the Oppo- 
sition, explained his words until his great purpose vanished 
into thin air and meaningless talk. The final result of the 
session then was this : a Relief of Distress Bill had been 
passed through which money was to reach distressed tenants, 
having first passed through the hands of the landlords ; and 
a Commission of Inquiry had been added to the long and 
dreary inquisitions that had investigated the Land question. 

The three famines which it had already produced since 
1800 were not regarded as evidence sufficient ; the three 
millions whom it had exiled in all the surroundings of 

1 Hansard, vol. cclv. pp. 2022-3. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 385 

cruelty and horror were not witnesses enough to the iniquity 
of the system : English opinion required more testimony and 
further witnesses. Thus the memorable recess of 1880 began. 
The Land League, in the meantime, had been vastly increased 
in numbers ; Mr. Dillon had made several strong speeches, 
and the temper of the country was daily rising. There had 
unfortunately, too, been, as in all periods of disturbance in 
Ireland and in every other country, a few cases of assassination. 
The vengeance of the emancipated, after centuries of serfdom, 
is always cruel and brutal in its earliest hours of victory. 
While thus the country was daily becoming more agitated, 
and daily advancing to larger demands, to closer organi- 
sation, and to a fiercer spirit, the Land Commission were 
slowly taking evidence and the Government gave no sign what- 
ever. Thus the situation which Mr. Parnell had to consider 
was one of extreme difficulty. The composition of the Land 
Commission, the words of Lord Hartington, and the silence 
of the other Ministers gave but too much reason to believe 
that the mind of the Government was not even yet made 
up for anything like a large measure of land reform. The 
refusal for so many years of any measure of relief, followed 
by the miserable insufficiency of the Land Act of 1 870, were 
too much calculated to make Mr. Parnell draw pessimist con- 
clusions from such facts. The great evil he had to avoid was 
that the mighty agitation of 1880 should not end, as did that 
of 1869-70, in an abortive and halting measure. Meantime 
there was the country before him, organising itself, as it had 
rarely ever been organised before, with mightier forces, making 
in the direction of complete reform, than had ever, perhaps, 
stood behind any movement. The nature of Mr. Parnell 
impels him to drive in political matters the hardest of hard 
bargains within his power ; his grip of a political advantage 
for his countrymen is as relentless as the grip of death. His 
course in the months that followed was dictated mainly by 
the sense that through no word or act of his should the chance 
of the people for a full and final settlement of all their claims 
be jeopardised or diminished. 

It is another essential evil of the present relations between 
England and Ireland that no great reform can be carried out - 



386 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

especially on the Land question — without bringing the people 
of Ireland, as Mr. Chamberlain said, to a state bordering on 
revolution ; and to a state bordering upon revolution the Irish 
people were now fast approaching. With all the tragic effects 
of the Irish Land question familiar to him and to his audience, 
and their strength to demand complete settlement, Mr. Parnell 
naturally gave no encouragement to the idea that the position 
of the Irish Land question had not yet passed beyond the 
stage of inquiry. 

The movement in its new phase received its first word of 
real guidance from Mr. Parnell at a meeting held in Ennis on 
September 19, 1880, and the speech he then delivered gave the 
keynote of the situation. First, he told the people to place 
no confidence in the Government Commission ; and, while he 
did not positively advise the farmers against giving evidence, 
he warned them against the danger of the acceptance of any 
responsibility for the proceedings of that body. 

What will be said if the tenant-farmers come before this Com- 
mission in any large numbers? It will be said that you have 
accepted the Commission — it will be said that you will be bound 
by its report, and if there is very much evidence given, it will form 
a very good excuse for the Government and for the English 
party to put off legislation on the Land question next session, until 
they have time to read the evidence and consider its bearings and 
effect. My opinion, then, decidedly is this, whatever harm you do 
to your cause by going before this Commission, you certainly will be 
able to do no good. 1 

Then he passed on to the declaration which after events 
did so much to prove correct — that it was to themselves 
and their own organisation the farmers were mainly to look 
for redress. 

Depend upon it (he said) that the measure of the Land Bill of 
next session will be the measure of your activity and • energy this 
winter ; it will be the measure of your determination not to pay un- 
just rents ; it will be the measure of your determination to keep a 
firm grip of your homesteads ; it will be the measure of your deter- 
mination not to bid for farms from which others have been evicted, 
and to use the strong force of public opinion to deter any unjust 

1 FreemaiUs Journal, Sept. 20, 1880. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 387 

men amongst yourselves — and there are many such— from bidding 
for such farms. If you refuse to pay unjust rents, if you refuse to 
take farms from which others have been evicted, the Land question 
must be settled, and settled in a way that will be satisfactory to you. 
It depends, therefore, upon yourselves, and not upon any Commission 
or any Government. When you have made this question ripe for 
settlement, then, and not till then, will it be settled. 1 

And, finally, he gave the advice with regard to 'boycot- 
ting ' which was afterwards quoted hundreds of times against 
him. 

Now what are you to do (he said) to a tenant who bids for a 
farm from which another tenant has been evicted ? 

Several voices : Shoot him ! 

Mr. Parnell : I think I heard somebody say 'Shoot him!' I 
wish to point out to you a very much better way — a more Christian 
and charitable way, which will give the lost man an opportunity of 
repenting. When a man takes a farm from which another has been 
unjustly evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet 
him ; you must show him in the streets of the town ; you must show 
him in the shop ; you must show him in the fair-green and in the 
market-place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone ; 
by putting him into a moral Coventry ; by isolating him from the 
rest of his country as if he were the leper of old — you must show him 
your detestation of the crime he has committed. 2 

There have been few things tha't Mr. Parnell has said 
throughout his career, which have been more bitterly criticised 
than the counsel given in these words. Barristers have as- 
sailed him in the House of Commons who would have merci- 
lessly boycotted the counsel that held direct intercourse with a 
client without the mediation of a solicitor ; doctors who would 
mercilessly boycot a professional brother who advertised or 
compounded medicines, or violated any other article of a 
complex professional code ; politicians who had mercilessly 
driven out of their organisations the backsliders from political 
principles ; members of clubs who had ostracised offenders 
against the laws of honour or of conventionality : representa- 
tives of working classes whp had wrung from a Conservative 
Ministry the right of workmen to boycot avaricious em- 
ployers. The principles of boycotting have thus been applied 

1 Free7>iari s Journal, Sept. 20, 1SS0, 2 lb. 



388 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

in ordinary times, and in ordinary occupations, by some of 
those who most loudly denounced it. What was the time, 
and what the circumstances, in which it was recommended 
by Mr. Parnell ? The reader of the preceding pages will 
not fail to notice that one of the most fertile sources of land- 
lord wrong and tenant suffering was the fierce competition 
for the possession of land. It has been seen how that com- 
petition has induced tenants to offer a rent measured not by 
the capacities of the land but by their own despair ; and it is 
perfectly clear that as long as eviction produced through this 
unchecked competition an increase of rent, eviction was a 
temptation and not a horror to the landlord. At this moment 
the Irish tenants were engaged in a great effort to break once 
and for ever the thraldom of centuries. Against this effort 
were arrayed the mighty forces of the empire. By a strict 
combination alone among themselves could the Irish tenantry 
hope for success ; and the boycotting of any man who lent 
by land-grabbing assistance to the landlord was essential to 
success. Boycotting was abused ; it was occasionally used 
for private purposes ; it sometimes led to crime ; but it was 
at least a far less savage mode of warfare than assassination, 
which it largely replaced. Until coercion brought homicidal 
frenzy it did much to keep down the number of outrages ; and, 
as Mr. John Dillon said in reply to an attack, it kept the roof 
over the heads of many a thousand men and women who, 
without it, would have been thrown on the roadside to perish. 
The meeting at Ennis was followed by several other de- 
monstrations, at most of which there were the same array of 
numbers, which had been unparalleled since the days of the 
Liberator. At all of these meetings Mr. Parnell practically 
preached the same principles. It would be well worth while 
for anybody who wishes to study the strange career of this 
Irish leader to read over again those speeches, for he will 
find in them that foresight and that grasp of the central and 
essential facts of the situation and the real necessities of the 
time which justify Mr. Parnell's extraordinary reputation. 
He had to fight at this period not merely the halting purpose 
of the Ministry, but also the feeble resolves of some men 
within the national ranks. The complete separation had 



THE LAND LEAGUE 389 

not as yet taken place between his own supporters and the 
followers of Mr. Shaw. Some of those gentlemen preached 
after the manner of the feeble and the flabby in the presence 
of a great crisis. They still adhered to the ' three F's ' as the 
final settlement of the question. They solemnly recommended 
moderation to the farmers, when the real danger was not in 
the extravagance of the demands made by the Irish people, 
but in the grudging bestowal of minimised concession by the 
House of Commons and the House of Lords. They amused 
themselves with elaborate schemes, instead of leaving the re- 
sponsibility to the Ministers. They had much to say of the 
difficulties of Mr. Gladstone and of Mr. Forster, and little of 
the difficulties of the peasants who, with their backs to the 
walls, fought a life-and-death struggle with hunger and 
eviction. Mr. Parnell, while personally courteous and tolerant 
to a degree that looks almost weakness, 1 at this time, to these 
gentlemen, and their proposals, steadily pursued his own path. 
He reiterated and reiterated again the doctrine that the 
amount of Ministerial concession would depend upon the 
strength and determination of the organisation. 

I believe (he said at New Ross) I have always expressed the 
opinion that the question will be settled when it is perfectly ripe for 
settlement throughout the length and breadth of the country, and it 
is far more important for us to make the question ripe than to knock 
our heads against each other, discussing plans as to how it may be 
best settled before it is ripe. 2 

The extreme limit of our demands (he said at Longford), when 
the time comes, must be measured, as I have said repeatedly in other 
places already, by the results of your exertions this winter, and you 
may rely upon it that, whatever your exertions entitle you to claim, we 
will press for with vigour, determination, and success. The nature 
of the settlement of the Land question depends entirely upon your- 
selves. The Government have no notion yet how they are going to 
settle it, and they won't make up their minds until they see what you 
are going to do. 3 

1 Speaking, for instance, of a colleague who had proposed, as a settlement of 
the Land question, the extension to the rest of Ireland of the Ulster custom— that 
is to say, of the custom which had made Ulster one of the most rack-rented of all 
the provinces of Ireland — Mr. Parnell said, ' I wish to speak in the most kindly, 
forbearing, and friendly manner, recognising the right of everybody to differ from 
me.' — Freeman's Journal, Sept. 26, 18S0. 

■ lb. s lb. Oct. 18, 18S0. 



390 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

He used to point out the objection to the ' three F's ' as 
either a practical or a final solution to the question. One of the 
arguments, it is true, which he brought against this proposal 
was not realised. He pointed out that to the doctrine of 
fixity of tenure at valued rents Mr. Gladstone, .Mr. Bright, 
and Mr. Forster had repeatedly declared their hostility, 
and upon this he founded the argument that it was vain to 
hope for the concession of the 'three F's' from a Ministry 
which contained these three gentlemen. He had not yet 
learned the readiness with which they could change their 
often-expressed opinions under the pressure of a popular 
movement. The settlement which he proposed was Peasant 
Proprietary. 

We seek as Irish Nationalists (he said at New Ross on 
September 25, 1S80), for a settlement of the Land question which 
shall be permanent — which shall for ever put an end to the war of 
classes which unhappily has existed in this country. _ . . a war 
which supplies, in the words of the resolution, the strongest induce- 
ment to the Irish landlords to uphold the system of English misrule 
which has placed these landlords in Ireland. And looking forward 
to the future of our country, we wish to avoid all elements of 
antagonism between classes. I am willing to have a struggle 
between classes in Ireland — a struggle that should be short, sharp, 
and decisive — once for all ; but I am not willing that this struggle 
should be perpetuated at intervals, when these periodic revaluations 
of the holdings of the tenants would come under the system of 
what is called 'fixity of tenure at valued rents.' * 

It is well to add that, in every one of the speeches in 
which he spoke of peasant proprietary, he definitely laid down 
the doctrine that peasant proprietary was to be obtained not 
by violence, but by the payment of reasonable compensation 
to the landlords. 

The real objection (he said in his New Ross speech) is that 
this system of landlordism would still remain, and that the solution 
which has been obtained in other countries, and which has succeeded 
in other countries — in France, in Germany, in Holland, in Italy, and 
even in Spain — would not be ours, but that we should be left to 
struggle on with this constant source of confusion and disunion still 

1 Freeman 's Journal, Sept. 26, 1880. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 391 

existing amongst us. Now, then, is the time for the Irish tenantry 
to show their determination — to show the Government of England 
that they will be satisfied with nothing less than the ownership of the 
land of Ireland. 1 

Talk of fixity of tenure at fair rents (he went on), I think that 
the Irish tenants should be able to look forward to a time when all 
rents would cease — when they would have homes of their own, with- 
out the necessity of making annual payments for them. And I see 
no difficulty in arriving at such a solution, and in arriving' at it in 
this way : by the payment of a fair rent, and a fair and fixed rent not 
liable to recurrent and perhaps near periods of revision, but by the 
payment of a fair rent for the space of, say, thirty-five years, after 
which time there would be nothing further to pay, and in the mean- 
time the tenant would have fixity of tenure. 2 

Let the arbitration (he said) be made now, and you would find 
that the magic of property, which turns sand into gold, would enable 
the then safe, and the now miserable tenant of the most barren and 
unproductive holdings in Ireland to bring it into such a state of 
culture as to put him beyond the reach of famine after two or even 
three bad seasons. 3 

One sentence, finally, from his speeches of this period. 
Mr. Parnell's mode, means, and end were curtly described 
once by the Prime Minister as passing through rapine to dis- 
memberment. I have already quoted the sentence which 
will effectually dispose of the charge of rapine, and now for 
one in which the seeking of dismemberment was mainly 
founded. Speaking at Galway on October 24, 1880, Mr. 
Parnell said : — 

I expressed my belief at the beginning of last session that the 
present Chief Secretary, who was then all smiles and promises, 
should not have proceeded very far in the duties of his office before 
he would have found that he had undertaken an impossible task to 
govern Ireland, and that the only way to govern Ireland is to allow 
her to govern herself. . . . And if they prosecute the leaders of this 
movement ... it is not because they wish to preserve the lives of 
one or two landlords . . . but it will be because they see that behind 
this movement lies a more dangerous movement to their hold over 
Ireland ; because they know that if they fail in upholding landlordism 
here — and they will fail— they have no chance of maintaining it over 
Ireland ; it will be because they know that if they fail in upholding 

1 Freeman' 's Journal, Sept. 26, 18S0. - lb. 3 lb. 



392 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

landlordism in Ireland, their power to misrule Ireland will go too. 
I wish to see the tenant farmers prosperous ; but large and important 
as is the class of tenant farmers, constituting as they do, with their 
wives and families, the majority of the people of this country, I would 
not have taken off my coat and gone to this work if I had not known 
that we were laying the foundation in this movement for the regene- 
ration of our legislative independence. 1 

This sentence, which was often quoted, as it will be seen, 
simply demands the restoration of the Irish Parliament ; and 
that is not dismemberment. It was almost enough to make an 
Irishman frenzied to hear this sentence of Mr. Parnell quoted 
over and over again as the sudden revelation of some new, dia- 
bolical, unheard-of policy. Mr. Parnell announced himself a 
Home Ruler. Was there anything new, or diabolical, or un- 
heard of in that? Home Rule in 1880 had always been the 
avowed policy of an Irish party numbering the great majority 
of the Irish representatives since 1874. Mr. Butt was a Home 
Ruler, so were all his followers ; Mr. Parnell himself had 
been elected as a Home Ruler five years before the Galway 
speech. To say that he could not have entered into the 
land agitation if he did not believe that it would help towards 
Home Rule, was to make the not very unnatural declaration 
that the reform of the land system would tend towards the 
restoration of an Irish Parliament. 

In the meantime, while thus the movement in Ireland was 
reaching its springtide, everybody was looking for a sign on 
the part of the Government of any real apprehension of the 
situation. Mr. Gladstone had not a syllable to say on this great 
struggle : he was at that time too busy with Dulcigno, the diffi- 
culties of the Montenegrins, and the humiliation of the 'unspeak- 
able Turk ' to bend his mind to the consideration of an island 
sixty miles off which contained five millions of British subjects, 
and was making a movement more perilous to British peace 
than any since the death of the Great Liberator. Mr. Glad- 
stone moving the fleets of all the great Powers, and turning 
Europe upside down, to transfer a few thousand semi-savages 
in Eastern Europe from one barbarous ruler to another, while 
close beside him, entirely unheeded, was growing up this 

1 Freeman 's Journal, October 25, 1880. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 393 

gigantic Irish crisis, is one of the most comic and most in- 
structive pictures in the government of Ireland by British 
statesmanship. 

And how was it with the Chief Secretary? From this 
period forward Mr. Forster disappears from history as an 
advocate of reform, and becomes the chief, the fiercest, and 
the main champion of coercion. As the days went on, 
instead of resignation came symptoms of the most stringent 
resolution to carry out the unjust law to its bitterest end. 
Extra police were drafted into the counties of Mayo and 
Galway, thus raising the burden of taxation upon the two 
counties that had suffered the most bitterly and escaped the 
most narrowly from the bitterest horrors of famine. The 
Orange writers in the North of Ireland adopted their usual 
policy of representing as a vast conspiracy against Protestantism 
a movement the unsectarian character of which was uni- 
versally acknowledged, and sought to prevent an alliance of 
Protestant and Catholic farmers against their common enemy 
by the characteristic effort to rouse the dying embers of 
religious hate. There was a hope, too, not merely that 
union would be prevented, but that collisions would be 
provoked which might swell the cry for coercion. The land- 
lord organs, in the meantime, began to cry out for repression ; 
and the London papers played their characteristic part of 
blackening events in Ireland and of exasperating the growing 
resentment between the two countries. Every single outrage, 
down to the very smallest, was laboriously and fully re- 
ported, until in the end English public opinion was excited 
to frenzy, and the comparatively few outrages of the period — 
and they were but few — were magnified to horrible and 
gigantic proportions. 

Towards the beginning of October the cry for coercion 
had swollen to a tempest, but for a moment it was laid by 
two remarkable speeches from Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamber- 
lain. 

I saw (said Mr. Bright) the statement the other day that about 
100 of them (the Irish landlords), equal nearly to the number of the 
Irish members, had assembled in Dublin and discussed the state of 
things, and they had nothing but their old remedy — force, the English 



394 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Government, armed police, increased military assistance and protec- 
tion, and it might be measures of restriction and coercion which they 
were anxious to urge upon the Government. The question for us to 
ask ourselves is, Is there any remedy for this state of things ? Force 
is no remedy (loud cheers). There are times when it may be neces- 
sary, and when its employment may be absolutely unavoidable, but 
for my part I should rather regard, and rather discuss, measures of 
relief as measures of remedy, than measures of force, whose influence 
is only temporary, and in the long run I believe is disastrous. 1 

The effect of these speeches was good and immediate. 
Ministerial organs which, but a few days before, were calling 
out for coercion, now, with perfect solemnity, declared that 
coercion was a perfectly impossible and impracticable policy. 
But time passed, and the storm again rose. A conflict then 
arose within the Cabinet itself. I cannot pretend to tell the 
story of this internal struggle, and I can only repeat what 
was the gossip of the period. It was said that Mr. Chamber- 
lain, Sir Charles Dilke, and Mr. Bright held out steadily, and 
for a considerable time, against the demand for coercion 
made by Mr. Forster. But Mr. Forster put forward this 
demand with daily increasing vehemence. For some days, 
according to the remark of the time, the Cabinet was within 
short distance of being broken up. Putting matter of prin- 
ciples aside, it is perhaps hard to say whether these three 
statesmen would have better consulted their future reputation 
and career if they had had at this crisis the courage of their 
convictions. It were better for Mr. Bright that his own 
record of many years of friendship to Ireland should have 
remained unstained by his venomous defence and heated 
advocacy of all the worst instruments of coercive policy ; and 
as his resignation was to come, it were better that it had 
come from the keenness of his sympathy with the struggling 
people of Ireland than for those of a foreign and remote country. 
Mr. Chamberlain may have qualified himself to reach more 
quickly the great goal towards which he is supposed to climb, 
but he would have had to-day a much higher reputation for 
constant adhesion to principle if he had stood by his con- 
victions on this occasion. And for all the Ministers it would 

1 Times, November 17, 1880. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 395 

have been better if they had listened to their own forebodings 
and steadily resisted the demands of Mr. Forster's terrors or 
ferocity, by refusing to create in coercion that monstrous 
parent which brought forth such unholy progeny in the crimes 
of 1 88 1, the homicidal fury of the Dynamiters and the utter 
estrangement between the two nationalities. The main argu- 
ment before which the hesitations of the Ministry broke down 
was the enormous increase which Mr. Forster was able to show 
in the outrages in October and November. And the increase 
which appeared in the figures he laid before his colleagues was 
enormous indeed. By-and-by these figures will be examined, 
and it will be seen what the merits of the case were upon 
which Mr. Forster based his demands. For the present, 
suffice it to say that Mr. Forster carried his point ; the 
opponents of coercion resolved to remain in the Cabinet, and 
it was announced that the next session of Parliament would 
open with a proposal for the enactment of coercive legislation. 
Meantime a blow was made at the leaders of the move- 
ment On November 2, 1880, an information was filed at 
the suit of the Right Hon. Hugh Law, then the Attorney- 
General, against Mr. Parnell and four of his Parliamentary 
colleagues, Mr. T. D. Sullivan, Mr. Sexton, Mr. John Dillon, 
and Mr. Biggar ; and also against Mr. Patrick Egan, trea- 
surer, and Mr. Brennan, secretary, of the organisation. In 
the indictment were also bundled several persons who held 
subordinate places in the organisation, or were entirely un- 
connected with it. 

There were nineteen counts in the indictment against the 
traversers. The main charges were — conspiring to incite 
the tenantry not to pay their rents ; deterring tenants from 
buying land from which other tenants had been evicted ; 
conspiring for the purpose of injuring the landlords ; and 
forming combinations for the purpose of carrying out these 
unlawful ends. This, then, was the proceeding of the Liberal 
Government ! There is scarcely one of these charges which 
were not the glory instead of the shame of Mr. Parnell and 
his fellow-traversers. Mr. Parnell had found the people face 
to face with famine and groaning under the oppression of 
centuries. He had brought them to such assertion of their 



396 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

rights, to such a potent combination, that, instead of being 
swept away, as in all previous occurrences, by wholesale hunger 
and plague and eviction, and thereafter reduced to deeper 
wretchedness and more hopeless slavery, not one man among 
them died from hunger or from disaster, and that, rising up 
from their misery and impotence, they gradually reached the 
position of practical omnipotence over their oppressors. The 
events and calamities which seemed to drive the tenantry back 
into the doom of hunger and of servitude had brought to them 
a new birth of political hope and power ; and an hour of appa- 
rently darkest misery had been changed into the dawn of a new 
and a better day. A man of any other nationality who had 
accomplished such things— if he had been an Italian or a Pole ; 
still more, at this epoch, if he had been a Bulgarian or a Monte- 
negrin — would have taken an imperishable place in the ador- 
ation of Englishmen ; and his reward, being an Irishman, was 
that a Liberal administration dragged him through the mire of 
a criminal court. The trial was opened by a startling episode. 
With their usual mistake in regarding things in Ireland as 
necessarily the same as in England, because called by the same 
names, the English public were and are accustomed to look 
upon an Irish judge as raised above the passions of political 
partisanship. They were strangely shocked in the course of 
the preliminary proceedings of the trial to read a judgment 
of the Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench in which the trial 
was to take place — a judgment in which the traversers were 
denounced with vehement passion. The times had been so 
changed since the elevation of a man like Judge Keogh to the 
Bench, that the Lord Chief Justice found that even the English 
people could not stomach such conduct, and he retired at the 
opening of the trial. 

The trial was one of the solemn mockeries of the time. 
It was known by the Crown that no impartial jury would 
convict the saviour of the nation of treason for the nation ; 
and after a trial extending over twenty days, the jury were 
discharged without agreeing to a verdict, ten, according to 
universal rumour, being in favour of acquittal and two for 
conviction. Another event of importance occurred during 
this recess. Shortly after his arrival in America on his 



THE LAND LEAGUE 397 

memorable mission, Mr. Parnell found the services of a 
secretary absolutely necessary. He had previously made the 
acquaintance of a young Irishman who at that period was 
secretary in a London house of business and the London 
correspondent of the ' Nation ' newspaper. The young man 
had made a strong impression upon the Irish leader, had gained 
his confidence, and had taken part with some others in many 
of the important consultations at critical moments. This, as 
has already been explained, was Mr. T. M. Healy. To Mr. 
Healy Mr. Parnell's thoughts turned when he found himself 
immersed in a hopeless sea of correspondence. He requested 
Mr. Healy's presence in America by telegraph. On the day 
he received this telegram Mr. Healy threw up his situation, 
and on that same evening he was on his way to the vessel 
which took him to America. 

It ought to be a comparatively easy task to write a bio- 
graphy of Mr. Healy, for English contemporary chronicles 
are not only full of his name, but absolutely teem with par- 
ticulars of his life, especially in its earliest years. Society 
journals have on various occasions especially busied them- 
selves with the member for South Derry, and, according to 
these veracious organs, Mr. Healy began life in a rag-and- 
bone shop, and, after much labour, graduated into a ticket- 
nipper. In various other journals there have been equally 
lively accounts. Mr. Healy has been described as ignorant 
and impudent, as foolish and as crafty, as rolling in ill-gotten 
wealth and as buried in abysmal and disreputable poverty. 
There is no man of any Parliamentary party, in fact, of which 
so many portraits have been painted, and who has had to 
bear so many of these slings and arrows which the outrageous 
pens of hostile journalism can fling. A biography brought 
down to the limits of fact and reality will necessarily be but 
tame reading after history written in a style so striking and 
so lurid. 

Timothy Michael Healy was born in Bantry, county Cork, 
in the year 1855. Bantry, as has been seen, is also the birth- 
place of the Sullivans, and here Healy had beheld all the 
scenes of quick decay which have been already described. He 
had peculiar opportunities indeed for becoming familiar with 



398 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the awful horrors of the famine, for his father, at seventeen 
years of age, had been appointed Clerk of the Union at 
Bantry, and his occupation brought him into contact with all 
the dread realities of that terrible time. He has told his son 
that for the three famine years he never once saw a single smile. 
Outside the abbey in which the forefathers of Healy and the 
other men of Bantry are buried are pits in which many 
hundreds of the victims of the famine found a coffmless 
grave ; and Mr. Healy will tell you, with a strange blaze in 
his eyes, that even to-day the Earl of Bantry, the lord of 
the soil, will not allow these few yards of land to be taken 
into the graveyard, preferring that they should be trodden 
by his cattle. Reared in scenes like these, it is no wonder 
that Healy, whose nature is vehement and excitable, should 
have grown up with a burning hatred of English rule in 
Ireland. 

He went to school to the Christian Brothers at Fermoy ; 
but fortune did not permit him to waste any unnecessary 
time in what are called the seats of learning ; for at thirteen he 
had to set out on the difficult business of making a livelihood. 
It is characteristic of his nature that, though he has thus had 
fewer opportunities than almost any other member of the 
House of Commons of obtaining education — except such as 
his father, an educated man, may have imparted to him as a 
child — he is really one of the very best informed men in the 
place. He is intimately acquainted with not only English 
but also with French and with German literature, and the 
' rude barbarian ' of the imagination of English journalists is 
keenly alive to the most delicate beauties of Alfred de Musset 
or Heinrich Heine, and could give his critics lessons in what 
constitutes literary merit and literary grace. Another of the 
accomplishments which Mr. Healy taught himself was Pit- 
man's shorthand ; and shorthand in his case — as in that of 
Justin McCarthy and several other of his colleagues — was the 
sword with which he had in life's beginning to open the oyster 
of the world. At sixteen years of age he went to England 
and obtained a situation as a shorthand clerk in the office of 
the superintendent of the North-Eastern Railway at New- 
castle, which is the foundation for that ' ticket-nipper ' episode 



THE LAND LEAGUE 399 

in the biography of Society journalism. Newcastle-on-Tyne, 
as those who have ever visited it will know, has a very large 
and a very sturdy Irish population, who take an active part 
in all political movements that are going on, and when Healy 
went there he found himself at once surrounded by country- 
men who, if anything, held to the National faith more sturdily 
than their brethren at home. Probably he himself, if he were 
to trace the mental history of his political progress, would 
declare that in his case, as in that of so many other Irishmen, 
it was an English atmosphere that first gave form and inten- 
sity to his political convictions. At all events, the newcomer 
was not long at Newcastle when he was a persistent and an 
active participator in all the political strivings of his fellow- 
countrymen, and it speaks strongly of his force of character 
and their discrimination that, though yet but a stripling, he 
was chosen for several positions of authority. Newcastle is 
one of the few towns in England that can boast of having a 
society exclusively devoted to Irish purposes — a disgraceful 
confession, it may be said in passing, for an Irishman resident 
in England to have to make — and of the Irish Literary In- 
stitute Mr. Healy was for a considerable time the secretary. 
He was also, as far back as 1873, secretary to the local 
Home Rule Association. Of Mr. Healy's habits in New- 
castle a characteristic account is given by one of his friends. 
He lodged in the house of an excellent Irish family — known 
to every Irish visitor to Newcastle — and in the family there 
was a Celtic abundance of children. It will relieve many 
friends of Mr. Healy to be informed that this man, before 
whom Ministers tremble, and even potent officials grow pale, 
is the delight and the darling of children, whose foibles, 
tastes, and pleasures he can minister to with the unteachable 
instinct of genius. The moment the young clerk put his foot 
inside his lodgings there came a shout of welcome from the 
young world upstairs ; the next minute he was romping with 
them all ; and, during the whole -period of his stay within 
doors, he was the gayest and the youngest in the house. But 
when the time came for starting into the outside world of 
Newcastle and of Englishmen, Healy at once put on his suit 
of mail ; his hat was tightened down on his head, his face 



400 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

assumed a frown of a most forbidding aspect, and even his 
teeth were set. And so he went out to encounter the enemy. 
We know but very little of each other after all ; and pro- 
bably a good many Englishmen who saw only the outside 
presentment of young Healy in those days put him down as 
a curmudgeon ; while, on the other hand, keener and more 
sympathetic observers may have smiled at the rugged sin- 
cerity of the young man's faith, — for, after all, individual 
Englishmen, unless they be fools or brutes, are rarely un- 
kind or even uncivil to individual Irishmen, and the frenzied 
hate that Irishmen have for England is a matter of amused 
surprise to most Englishmen. All the same, a good, hearty, 
and frank hate of oppression is a fine symptom in a boy, 
and was the most fitting prologue to the fearless political 
manhood of Mr. Healy. 

In March, 1878, he removed to London, partly for com- 
mercial and partly for journalistic reasons. He is distantly 
related to Mr. John Barry, M.P. for Wexford, and at that 
period Mr. Barry was associated with a large Scotch floor- 
cloth factory. Mr. Healy was employed as confidential clerk 
in this firm, and in connection, with this part of his career an 
anecdote will not be uninstructive. While Mr. Barry was 
visiting an English provincial town in company with one 
of his then partners, the conversation turned on Mr. Healy, 
who was taking a prominent part in the discussion of the 
Land Bill. The results of his vigilance are now written in 
imperishable letters on the land legislation of Ireland ; but 
naturally he was represented to the English public as a mere 
mischievous imp who was interfering with the beneficent 
designs of the good man, Gladstone, and comments upon 
him were uncomplimentary. One of his many detractors 
asked Mr. Barry's partner whether it was true that Mr. Healy 
had at one time been a clerk in his office, and the reply, ' It 
was,' was given as if these two words set ' the seal on all Mr. 
Healy's other crimes. ' Yes,' said Mr. Barry, taking up the 
conversation, ' and that's about the only fact that will survive 
about your blank blanked office ; ' which is so far untrue that 
probably not even the employment of the author of the 
Healy Clause will secure the floor-cloth firm from the waters 
of oblivion. 



THE LAND LEAGUE 401 

The second reason Mr. Healy had for emigrating to 
London was that he was asked to contribute a weekly letter 
to the ' Nation ' on Parliamentary proceedings, which had 
just begun to get lively. From this time forward his face 
accordingly became familiar in the lobby of the House of 
Commons. He had previously made the acquaintance of 
Mr. Parnell and the other prominent Irish figures of the last 
Parliament at Home Rule meetings and elsewhere, and his 
connection with the Sullivan family had made him more or 
less familiar with the ' inside ' of Irish political movements. 
He at once threw all his force on the side of the ' active ' 
section of the old Home Rule party, and Mr. Parnell has 
several times remarked that it was to Mr. Healy's advocacy 
and explanation of his policy in the columns of the ' Nation ' 
that the active party owed much of its success in those early 
days, when its objects and tactics were misunderstood and 
actively misrepresented. The London correspondence of Mr. 
Healy was, indeed, a rare journalistic treat. In the opinion of 
many, his pen is even more effective than his tongue : mor- 
dant, happy illustration, trenchant argument — all these things 
were to. be found in those London letters, and are still 
happily at the service of Irish national journalism. The 
style of Mr. Healy is founded palpably on that of John 
Mitchel, and he has many of the excellences, and a few also 
of the faults, of that writer ; but these very faults only make 
him the more readable : for liveliness, after all, is the first 
attraction of journalistic prose. 

Anticipating a little, Mr. Healy had scarcely taken his place 
in the House when he set to work, and his first speech was in 
reply to the Marquis of Hartington. It was late at night 
when the young member rose ; the deputy-leader of the 
Ministerialists had made an effective address, and most of Mr. 
Healy's friends felt rather anxious as to the result. Mr. Healy 
can now bear to be told that there were very divided opinions 
as to the merits of his first appearance. His speech was 
delivered in a hard, dogged style, and gave evidence rather of 
fierce conviction than of debating power. It was some timet 
indeed, before the House would acknowledge that there was 
anything in Mr. Healy ; and there has scarcely ever been an 



402 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Irish member who had in his early days to face the fire of 
such brutal, mean, and cowardly attack. Gentlemen of the 
Press professed to be shocked at the intelligence that the 
new member was poor, that he actually, like themselves, 
wrote for a living, and even the cut of his clothes afforded 
proof of the ignobility of his character. But Mr. Healy took 
no notice of all this ribaldry, except, perhaps, to become 
fiercer in his wrath and more persistent in his activity. In 
the nine weeks' struggle against coercion he was, though 
a novice, one of the three or four men who did the largest 
amount of talking, and one has to go to the records of 
Biggar's best days and Sexton's longest speech to find any 
approach to the performances of Healy. When at last the 
Coercion Bills were done with, in 1881, Mr. Healy found more 
profitable employment in discussing the details of the Land 
Bill. While ninety-nine out of every hundred of the members 
of Parliament were floundering in the mazes of that extra- 
ordinary measure, Mr. Healy had found the key of the 
labyrinth, and was perfectly familiar with its details. He 
worked, as is known, night and day at the Bill, obtained 
several concessions, and finally succeeded, under circumstances 
to be presently described, in having the Healy clause adopted. 
These various successes at last made the House begin to 
change its opinion of its latest recruit. It was observed that 
Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Law used to listen with the utmost 
attention to anything Mr. Healy had to say. The Premier 
was even one night beheld in pleasant converse with his 
young and unsparing antagonist, and at once the servile herd 
of English journalists began to recognise Mr. Healy's talents. 
The saying of the time is well known, that but three men in 
the House of Commons knew the Land Bill — Mr. Gladstone, 
Mr. Law, and Mr. Healy. 

A few words as to Mr. Healy's general characteristics. 
Perhaps the most remarkable of all his qualities is his rest- 
less industry. From the moment he crosses the tessellated 
floor of the lobby, at about four in the evening, till the House 
rises, he is literally never a moment at rest — excepting the 
half hour or so he spends at dinner in the restaurant within 
the House. He has almost as many correspondents as a 



THE LAND LEAGUE 403 

Minister, and he tries to answer- nearly every letter on the 
day of its receipt. Then he takes an interest in, and knows 
all about, everything that is going on, great or small, English, 
or Irish, or Scotch. With eyes ablaze, he comes to tell you 
of some atrocious job that is perpetrated under sub-section B 
in the schedule to a Scotch Bill on Hypothec, or a Welsh 
measure on threshing machines ; and he points out the 
advantage to an Irish Bill for reforming the grand jury by a 
' block ' he has put against a Bill for increasing the number of 
Commissioners in Bankruptcy. The extent of his knowledge 
of Parliamentary measures is astonishing ; many bitter oppo- 
nents in public policy seek his aid in this regard ; and — tell 
it not in Gath ! — there have been occasions when he has been 
seen explaining in the Library the mysteries of legislation to 
Mr. Herbert Gladstone. Indeed, Healy holds himself at the 
service of everybody. A puzzled colleague comes to ask for 
enlightenment ; Healy has put his ideas in the shape of an 
amendment before he has had time to give them full ex- 
pression. Besides all this, Healy has frequently to write 
a column or two for a newspaper in the course of the even- 
ing. And he is never absent from the House when anything 
of importance is going forward. He is, perhaps, the only 
man in the House — except Mr. Gladstone — who cannot bear 
a moment's idleness ; and, like the Premier, he is distinguished 
from other members by the fact that even in the division 
lobbies he is to be seen utilising the precious moments by 
writing at one of the tables. The characteristics of his ora- 
tory are by this time familiar. Often, when he stands up 
first, he is tame, disjointed, and ineffective, but he is one of 
the men who gather strength and fire as they go along ; and 
before he has resumed his seat, he has said some things that 
have set all the House laughing, and some that have put all 
the House into a rage. It is curious to observe the effects his 
speeches sometimes have even upon enemies. There was an 
occasion when he was saying some particularly strong things 
against the Irish landlords ; and Colonel King-Harman — 
who is nearly always ready to boil over — at last could- 
stand it no longer, and rose in wild rage to call Mr. Healy to 
order. Pie did not succeed in tripping up the member for 



4 o4 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Monaghan, and sat down with a face of wild discomfiture. 
But after a while the savage breast of the poor Colonel was 
subdued by the spell of Healy's tongue, the heavy frown 
lifted itself from his brows, and a broad smile spread over 
his whole face. It has been noticed that his speeches have 
begun to be marked by a power that was wanting to them 
until recently. Finally, Healy has the defects of his qualities. 
The ardour of his temperament and the fierceness of his con- 
victions often tempt him to exaggeration of language and of 
conduct. Those who play the complicated game of politics 
for such mighty stakes as a nation's fate and the destinies of 
millions, ought to keep cool heads and steady hands. A 
quick temper and a sharp tongue cause many pangs to his 
friends, but keener tortures to Healy himself. He is be- 
trayed into a rude expression, and then goes home and 
remains in sleepless contrition throughout the night. 

It was, of course, inevitable that, when the agitation broke 
out, one of these antecedents and of this temperament should 
throw himself into the movement ; and to those who now 
know Mr. Healy, it will not be surprising to hear that he 
worked with fierce energy and often spoke with passionate 
vehemence. 

Passing through the South of Ireland, Mr. Healy became 
acquainted with the circumstances of a very curious case — 
the case of Michael McGrath. McGrath had held for years a 
farm, but, the rent having been raised from 48/. to 105/., had at 
last to yield in the struggle, and was evicted. His land was 
' grabbed ' by another farmer named Cornelius — or, as he 
was called in the district, ' Curley ' — Mangan, and a decree of 
ejectment was given against McGrath for the house which had 
been built by his own hands or by those of his father. McGrath 
and his family did not tamely submit to the judgment of the 
law. They stood a siege for some days, and, whenever the 
evicting party approached near enough, threw boiling water 
upon them. The family were watched so closely that they 
were unable even to go out to get a drink of water, and at last 
were reduced by famine to capitulation. But the struggle was 
not over when they were turned out. McGrath went back to 
his farm, and was sent to gaol. His wife took possession, and 



THE LAND LEAGUE 405 

was sent to gaol. His sister took possession, and was sent 
to gaol. As each member of the family was released he or 
she went back again, and again they were each in turn sent 
to gaol. At last they had to give up the struggle for the house, 
and they then adopted an expedient which, perhaps, could 
only be resorted to in Ireland, of all civilised lands. McGrath 
got a boat and turned it upside down, and under this boat 
lived himself, his wife, his sister, and his children. The 
many tourists who crowd in the summer season to the 
beautiful regions of Glengariff were accustomed to stop on 
the road between Glengariff and Bantry to see this curious 
household. 

Mr. Healy was much struck with the story of McGrath, 
and he and Mr. J. W. Walsh, then an organiser of the Land 
League, paid a vist to Mangan to remonstrate with him on 
the injustice he had done to the tenant, whose property he 
had helped the landlord to rob. 

For his action in this matter Mr. Healy was arrested, 
and this was the first prominent arrest by the new Chief 
Secretary of the Liberal Government. Mr. Parnell and 
his friends at once resolved to make a return blow, and the 
opportunity soon came. The lamented death of Mr. William 
Redmond left a vacancy for the borough of Wexford. Mr. 
Healy was immediately nominated and returned without even 
the mention of opposition. But he had not yet escaped 
from Mr. Forster's vengeance ; and the circumstances of his 
trial showed the length to which the Government and their 
creatures on the Bench were ready to go. He was charged 
under one of the Acts in the terrible code known as the 
White-boy Acts. The Acts date from the last century, and 
the prisoner convicted under them is liable to a lengthened 
term of penal servitude, and to be once, twice, or thrice, 
publicly or privately whipped, each year. 

The case came before Judge Fitzgerald, and he joined the 
prosecuting counsel in exhausting every effort to procure a 
conviction. The two prisoners, Mr. Healy and Mr. Walsh, 
were, in the first place, tried at the winter assizes, and this 
was in itself an unusual and suspicious occurrence. The 
winter assizes are intended for the relief of prisoners who, 



406 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

being imprisoned, would otherwise have to wait till the spring 
assizes without having their cases decided ; but Mr. Healy 
and Mr. Walsh were not imprisoned. They were out on bail, 
and this was perhaps the first instance in which bailed pri- 
soners were tried at these assizes. The disadvantage to Mr. 
Healy and Mr. Walsh was that they were not tried by a jury 
of county farmers, many of whom might be in their favour, 
as their crime, if any, had been committed in defence of the 
farmers' cause. Then they were tried as misdemeanants, 
which reduced their power of challenge to six names ; and, 
throughout the trial, Judge Fitzgerald was a far more effec- 
tive cross-examiner on behalf of the Crown than the prose- 
cuting counsel. But in spite of all these efforts, Mr. Healy 
and Mr. Walsh were acquitted. 

It is, perhaps, as well here to tell the fate of McGrath. 
He continued in his boat for some years — still pursued by the 
many agencies that are on the side of the landlords in Ireland. 
For instance, he was charged by the county surveyor with 
trespassing on the road on which this boat-house was placed, 
and he only escaped through the inexhaustible ingenuity of 
Mr. Maurice Healy (Mr. Healy 's brother). But finally, 
through exposure to the weather, poor McGrath caught 
typhus fever, passed through the illness under the boat, died 
under it, and was there waked. Since then neighbours have 
built a small house for his widow and children. 

The scene now changed from the agitation in Ireland and 
from the State Trials : and interest was transferred from Dub- 
lin to Westminster. The result of the trial of Mr. Parnell was 
regarded as foregone, and excited but a languid interest. The 
real centre of attraction was the House of Commons. The 
Government had pledged themselves to begin business ; the 
Irish members at their annual meeting, held in the City Hall, 
Dublin, had, on their side, pledged themselves to exhaust 
every effort in opposing coercion. Everyone was anxious to 
see the opening of the portentous struggle. 



407 



CHAPTER XL 

THE COERCION STRUGGLE. 

PARLIAMENT met on Thursday, January 6. Nobody felt 
certain as to what would be the fate of the coercion proposals 
of the Government. There were rumours that the Radicals— 
so many of whom had obtained entrance to the House through 
the votes of Irish electors in England — would stand firm by 
their principles, and would resist the adoption of a Tory 
policy by a Liberal Ministry. The opinion was still pretty 
general among them that the wisest course on the part of the 
Government would be to introduce at once a large measure 
of land reform, and to trust to its healing effects to put down 
the outbreak of crime. The terms of the Queen's Speech were 
eagerly scanned, and it was held to be unsatisfactory on both 
the points on which the Irish members and the Radicals 
demanded satisfaction. The statements with regard to coer- 
cion were strong, the allusions to the coming Land Bill 
were weak. The Queen's Speech began its demand for 
coercion by a confession which was afterwards repeated in 
most of the speeches from the Treasury bench ; that con- 
fession was that crime in its most serious form had not 
largely increased. ' Attempts upon life,' said the Queen's 
Speech, ' have not grown in the same proportions as other 
offences.' The burden of the charge was that what was 
called ' an extended system of terror had been established ' 
which had 'paralysed almost alike the exercise of private 
rights and the performance of civil duties.' ' In other words, 
the main offence was that the organisation of the tenantry 
throughout the country had been made so complete that the 
landlords found it impossible any longer to get the tenants 
to play their game by internecine struggle for the privilege 

1 Hansard, vol. cclvii. p. 6. 



4o8 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of paying a rack-rent for the land. If such a conspiracy 
existed, it was a national conspiracy ; for membership of the 
Land League at this period was practically coterminous with 
the citizenhood of four-fifths of the country. The statement 
was frequently put forward, of course, that the terrorism 
which existed was the creation of a few agitators who were 
at the head of the Land League ; but this pretence was 
gradually dropped, and war was declared against the Land 
League as a body — that was. against the Irish people as a 
nation. And the Government had to put forward to different 
sets of opponents a somewhat contradictory line of defence ; 
they had to defend themselves for having been too early and 
too late in the application for coercive powers. Their reply 
was to appeal to previous precedents, such as those of 1814, 
1833, and 1846. They pointed out that in each of these 
cases the Government had tolerated the existence of a state 
of disturbance, and of disturbance far more violent than that 
of 1880, before they had applied for repressive laws. It was 
not till June 18 14 that coercion was proposed by Peel. He 
had been in office since August 18 12. He had to confess 
that disturbance had existed for two years. In 1833, when 
Lord Grey proposed a measure of coercion, there was disturb- 
ance beside which that of 1880 completely paled ; it had existed 
for the two preceding years of 1831 and 1832, and yet Sir 
Robert Peel did not censure but praised the Government for 
the postponement of the demand for coercive measures. Thus, 
in the case of the first precedent quoted, there had been a 
delay of nearly two years, and in the second of upwards of 
two years. In the present instance the Government were able 
to point only to two months of really increasing outrage in 
defence of their measure. 

Mr. Gladstone, in trying to defend the Government against 
the natural inference to be drawn from these arguments, said : 
' Perhaps it may be said I am proving too much, and I am 
showing that we are coming too soon to make this demand. 
When that charge is made we shall be quite prepared to meet 
* it and to argue the contrary.' ' But that promise he has never 
been able to fulfil. 

1 Hansard, vol. cclvii. p. 116. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 409 

The allusions in the Prime Minister's speech to the coming 
Land Act were even more vague and unsatisfactory than 
those of the Queen's Speech. He still stuck to the Act of 
1870 as fairly successful. 1 He almost went out of his way to 
pass a general eulogium upon the landlords as a class, and 
he even denied that there had been any general increase of 
the rents. 2 Probably, for strategical reasons, he also did his 
best to minimise the reforms which he was about to propose. 
His legislation was to be nothing better than a development 
of the principles of the Act of 1870. There were some faint 
promises of a tribunal for settling fair rent and of free sale, 
but he studiously avoided all mention of fixity of tenure — 
the third of the ' three F's.' 3 This speech increased the 
general alarm ; and when the Irish members complained of 
the insufficiency of the proposals which the Government had 
shadowed forth, they were received with cheers from the 
Radical benches. 4 

The Irish members, as has been seen, had pledged them- 
selves to oppose coercion by all the forms of the House, and 
the plan they adopted was to propose several amendments 
in succession. Mr. Parnell started by proposing ' That 
the peace and tranquillity of Ireland cannot be promoted by 
suspending any of the constitutional rights of the Irish 
people.' Mr. McCarthy followed with an amendment, ' Humbly 
to pray Her Majesty to refrain from using the naval, military 
and constabulary forces of the Crown in enforcing ejectments 
for non-payment of rent in Ireland, until the measures pro- 
posed to be submitted to Her Majesty with regard to the 
ownership of land in Ireland have been decided upon by 
Parliament' And finally, Mr. Dawson proposed ' That in the 
opinion of this House it is expedient to submit a measure 
for the purpose of assimilating the Borough Franchise in Ire- 
land to that in England, as promised in Her Majesty's most 
gracious speech last session.' 

1 • We are not at all prepared to admit that the Land Act has been a failure.' 
— Hansard, vol. cclvii. p. 119. 

- ' I do not wish at all to convey that it is my impression that rents in Ireland 
would in general be described with any fairness as being unfair or exorbitant.'— 
lb. p. 120. 

3 lb. pp. 1 20- 1. 4 lb. p. 222. 



410 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The instructions to the Irish members were that they 
should all speak, and speak as long as they could, and this 
mot d'ordre was strictly obeyed. Exception was made, of 
course, in the cases of those who had to propose subsequent 
amendments. They had to remain silent, for if they spoke 
their right of proposing an amendment would be forfeited. 
The Government and the Opposition meantime had passed 
their words of command also ; it was an order to maintain 
absolute silence, and the order was observed with unbroken 
obedience. The result was that, throughout the long hours 
of every evening and every night, the Irish members had to 
go on addressing empty benches, or benches that, if filled, 
were noisy, insolent, and provocative ; that each member had 
to talk when he had something and when he had nothing to 
say ; that each had to go through a certain length of time, 
weary or fresh, in good spirits or in bad. These long days 
and nights seemed for the time to make little impress upon 
those who took part in them, for the conjoint effect of 
excitement and anger kept them up. Then nearly all were 
young in parliamentary, and the most prominent figures in 
actual, years ; but Nature's Nemesis, though slow, is sure, and 
many of these members have since learned that the parlia- 
mentary pace, if it is not the pace which kills, is that which 
rapidly ages even robust physiques and shatters even stout 
nerves. 

This brought the debate on the Queen's Speech up to 
Thursday, January 20. By this time the aspect of affairs 
had undergone a considerable change. The exasperation 
caused by this prolonged resistance created a similar exaspera- 
tion outside the House of Commons. There was gradually 
rising one of those tempests of popular passion in England 
which sweep down party ties. The Radicals grew fewer 
and fainter in their opposition, the two English parties 
practically coalesced, and the House was united against the 
little Irish phalanx. The latter, on their part, exhausted, but 
still angry and determined, resolved to fight on ; and they, 
too, were backed by the rising temper of their own country. 
The Land League grew daily in power and in resources ; the 
subscriptions from America rose to an amount that a short 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 411 

time before would have been considered fabulous ; and on 
January 13 the treasurer was able to announce that during 
the week then past there had been received from various 
sources no less a sum than 4,050/. Eviction became daily- 
more impossible, and, though all the forces of the Crown were 
placed at the disposal of the landlords, the decree frequently 
had to remain unfulfilled in the presence of crowds of peasants 
armed with pitchforks, scythes, and pike-heads, and ready 
to perish in defence of their homesteads. These various 
circumstances were also aggravated by the daily con- 
tests at question time between Mr. Forster and the Irish re- 
presentatives. Every act of repression to which he resorted 
lent fuel to the flame, and from this period forward he 
took up an ultra-Tory attitude. He admitted no case of 
exceptional hardship, defended the police through thick and 
thin, and, in fact, adopted the policy of repression pure and 
simple. 

At last, on the night of Thursday, January 20, the third 
Irish amendment was disposed of. Immediately afterwards a 
new and unexpected amendment was proposed by Mr. O'Kelly, 
in consequence of the suppression of public meetings by the 
Chief Secretary. This motion did not occupy much time. Then 
Sir Wilfrid Lawson raised the question of the disarmament 
of the Basutos, and, this disposed of, the report on the Address 
was agreed to amid the general cheering of the House. One 
other event of importance had occurred in the interval between 
the opening of Parliament and this stage. On January 12 
it was announced that Mr. Shaw had retired from the Home 
Rule party. He was followed by all the other Home Rulers 
who with him had remained seated on the Liberal side of the 
House ; and thus the Irish party found themselves deserted 
by their own friends in face of the enemy, and in the very 
agony of pitched battle. 

On Monday, January 24, Mr. Forster introduced the first 
Coercion Bill. The speech which he delivered was one of the 
ablest that he has ever addressed to the House. The matter 
was well arranged, the delivery was good, the fierce passion 
which he felt lent effect to his denunciations, and the speech 
was full of those asides and suggestions which are natural to 



412 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

one of the greatest masters of adroit suggestiveness in the 
House of Commons. Its effect upon the House was very 
great, and the newspapers of the next morning proclaimed 
with unbroken unanimity that he had clearly and trium- 
phantly proved the case for coercion. Yet some of his posi- 
tions were startling enough to excite suspicion. He represented 
the adhesion to the Land League as brought about, not by 
sympathy with its principles, but by terror of its crimes. The 
tenants were for the most part consumed by the desire to pay 
the rents, but were compelled by the atrocious League to keep 
the money in their pockets. The masses of the population were 
filled with a love of the landlords—' the British garrison'— but 
the Land League terrorism turned their love into hate. In 
fact, all Ireland, according to the picture of the Chief Secretary, 
had consented to lie prostrate and cowed before this strange 
organisation. 

If we examine the speech in detail now, it will appear 
rather the recollection of a political nightmare than the re- 
trospect of a real episode in the history of two nations. It 
seems incredible after this lapse of time that the liberties 
of a people should be taken away on a case so hopelessly 
bad, and that an enlightened assembly should enter on a 
course so full of dread perils on evidence so grossly and so 
grotesquely insufficient. The speech of Mr. Forster himself 
is the best testimony to the madness of the time ; its equivo- 
cations and its admissions alike prove that men must have 
been temporarily insane to have accepted such an indictment 
against a nation as satisfactory. Let me examine rapidly the 
grounds on which Mr. 'Forster demanded Coercion. 

Mr. Forster's first position was that the total of crime was 
enormous and unprecedented ; and this he proceeded to 
prove by stating that the total number of outrages in the 
year 1880 was 2,590, and that this was the greatest total of 
crime ever recorded from the date when agrarian crimes were 
first distinctly tabulated — which w?s another way of stating 
that the crime of 1880 was the largest of any year on 
record. 

I have (he said) given a return of the total number of agrarian 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 413 

outrages in 1880, which shows that the total number was 2,590. We 
have a separation of the returns of agrarian from other crimes in 
Ireland since the year 1844, but not before, and the highest year 
during that period was the first year of the great famine — namely, 
1845. In that year the outrages numbered 1,920. Consequently 
last year they were 35 per cent, more than they have ever before 
been recorded to be. 1 

This statement of the case, if true, gave a strong — almost 
an unanswerable — argument in favour of Coercion. But the 
statement was entirely untrue. In the first place Mr. Forster 
had to reduce his big total of 2,590 down to 1,253, f° r the 
balance of 1,337 were threatening letters. If the House had 
been in a reasonable temper this announcement would have 
been so startling as to make it suspicious of the whole case 
of Mr. Forster ; for, of course, when Mr. Forster spoke to his 
colleagues of the appalling total of 2,590 crimes, what they 
would infer was that he was talking of crimes actually perpe- 
trated, not of crimes intended or threatened. 

Mr. Forster diverted attention from this astonishing reve- 
lation of the weakness of his case by appearing to frankly 
admit it ; and by still contending that even if this distinction 
were made between actual offences committed and mere 
threatening letters, still the year 1880 stood out in bold and 
bad relief from all the other years of Irish crime in the ex- 
tent of its criminality. 

In 1880 (he said), exclusive of threatening letters, the number of 
agrarian outrages was 1,253 ; in 1845, they were 950 — that is to say, 
that they were 32 per cent, higher last year than they were in the 
largest year of which we have any special record. Hon. members 
are well aware that there is now a great difference in the population. 
The population of Ireland is now some 5,000,000, compared with 
8,000,000 in 1845. Therefore, taking into account the difference of 
population, the actual agrarian outrages of last year, exclusive of 
threatening letters, were more than double what they were in the 
worst year we have any record of —namely, the year 1 845.2 

Here again we have a statement which is entirely untrue, 
to the extent that it gives a grossly — it may be said, a gigan- 

1 Hansard, vol. cclvii. p. 1209. 2 lb. 



414 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



tically — false representation of the state of affairs. It is 
entirely untrue to declare that the year 1880 was more 
criminal than any year from 1844. It would be far more 
correct to say that the year 1880 was a year startlingly free 
from crime in comparison with several of the years from 1 844. 
The criminal character of a year should assuredly be tested, 
not so much by the number of its crimes, as by their 
character. A year that had a hundred cases of petty larceny 
and no murder, would certainly be less criminal than a year 
that had fifty-two crimes, of which fifty were petty larceny 
and two were wilful murder, though there was a difference of 
forty-eight between the criminal totals of the one year and 
the other. A test of the criminality of these different years 
would be a comparison of such serious crimes as homicides, 
whether murder or manslaughter. Let us apply this test to 
1880 and other years, and this is what we find : — 





Homicides, described as Agrarian. 




1844 


. 18 


1850 . 


18 


1845 


. 18 


1851 . 


12 


1846 


. 16 


1869 


10 


1847 


. 16 


1879 


10 


1849 


." • 15 


1880 


8 



It will be seen from this table that, in serious agrarian 
crime, the year 1880 bore a most favourable contrast, not 
merely with many years since 1844, but also with the very 
year which preceded it. 

Let us try another form of comparison between the 
criminality of 1880 and that of preceding years. The distinc- 
tion made between agrarian and other outrages would seem 
to have been very lax in the early years of the statistical 
records. For instance, in the year 1 847 the total outrages in 
Ireland are set down as 2,986, and of these but 620 are placed 
to the credit of agrarian outrages. This must, of course, be in- 
accurate ; for 1 847, as has been seen, was a year of agrarian 
upheaval, and, instead of the proportion of crime between 
agrarian and non-agrarian being fairly represented by 620 on 
the one side, and the balance of the total of 2,986 on the 
other, it would seem far more likely that the greater number 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 



415 



of the 2,986 crimes were agrarian crimes — the crimes of 
starving and desperate peasants fighting for their patch of 
land and their meals of potatoes. In any case, let us now 
compare the total crime of 1880 with that of other years : — 





Total of 




Total of 


Year 


Outrages 


Year 


Outrages 


1844 . 


• 6,327 


1849 • 


. 14,908 


1845 • 


. 8,088 


1850 . 


• 10,639 


1S46 . 


• 12,374 


185 1 . 


• 9, T 44 


1847 . 


. 20,986 


l8So . 


. 5,609 


1848 . 


. 14,080 







This table will show a startling difference between the 
crime of 1880 and that of several of the years by which it 
was preceded. 

Finally, let us compare the total of murders of all kinds 
in 1880 with those of preceding years : — 



Year 


Homicides 


Yeai 


Homicides 


1S44. . 


146 


l8 5 I . 


• 157 


1845 • 


• 139 


1852 . 


I40 


1846 . 


170 


1853 • 


. 119 


1847 . 


212 


1870 


• 77 


1848 . 


. 171 


187I 


• 7i 


1849 . 


. 203 


1880 


. 69 


1850 . . 


• ^39 







But the strongest evidence of the comparative freedom 
from serious crime of 1 880 in comparison with other years is 
found in the speech of Mr. Forster himself. It has already 
been seen that this immunity from serious crime was acknow- 
ledged in the Queen's Speech. In the same way, Mr. Forster 
not only admitted it, but seemed to boast of it, and, by some 
strange form of reasoning, to regard it as the strongest argu- 
ment in favour of his position, that the year 1880 was 
horribly and exceptionally criminal. 

' Some honourable members,' he said, ' have said that 
after all there have been but few cases of murder, or attempt 
at murder' — and when this statement was received, as was 
natural, with cheers from the Irish members, the Chief 
Secretary made the reply — ' but they were not necessary ; ' ' 

1 Hansard, vol. cclvii. p. 12 13. 



416 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

and this answer was considered so satisfactory by the House 
generally, that the Ministerialists and Conservatives cheered 
in accord. 

Later on the Marquis of Hartington made exactly the 
same admission. 'I find,' he said, 'that during the year 
1879, when Ireland was ruled by a beneficent Conservative 
Government, there were ten agrarian homicides or murders, 
and in the year which has just elapsed there were seven.' 1 

I have now, from the words of the Queen's Speech, from 
the words of Mr. Forster, from the words of Lord Hartington, 
and from the figures, proved that in serious crime 1880, 
instead of being exceptionally criminal, was, compared with 
years of disturbances, exceptionally innocent ; and that dis- 
poses of Mr. Forster's first plea for Coercion. 

The second plea for Coercion was the enormous increase 
of crime in the latter half of the year 1880, and especially in 
the last three months of that year. 

I am also (said Mr. Forster) obliged to tell the House that 
there has been a great increase in the last three months of last 
year. Exclusive of threatening letters, 719 outrages out of the total 
of 1,253 for the entire year, occurred in the three months of October, 
November, and December ; and, including threatening letters, 1,696 
out of 2,590. That is to say, two-thirds of the total agrarian outrages 
occurred within the last quarter of the year, and 58 per cent, of these, 
exclusive of threatening letters. It is also right to say that the 
number which occurred in the month of December was much more 
than it is for October and November put together. 2 

1 The whole passage is worth quoting as showing how indignant a Minis- 
terialist could be at the idea that i8Sowas worse than 1879 : — 'The hon. member 
went on to pronounce one of the most solemn indictments against Her Majesty's 
Government which it has ever been my duty to listen to. I cannot follow him 
through the whole of that weighty indictment ; but I must say that, guilty as I 
felt myself when I heard his solemn tones, and when I learnt from him that, do 
what we could, we could never wash away from our guilty hands and our guilty 
souls the stains of the innocent blood which had been shed through our crimhal 
negligence, it was some consolation to me to turn from the solemn eloquence 
of the hon. member, and to refer to the prosaic facts which lay before me. I find 
that, during the year 1879, when Ireland was ruled by a beneficent Conservative 
Government, there were ten agrarian homicides or murders, and that in the year 
which has just elapsed there were seven ; I cannot, therefore, feel the blood of 
these murdered men rest so heavily on my soul when I think that even the efficient 
Government that preceded us was not able to protect life to so great an extent 
as it has been in our power to do. ' — Hansard, vol. eclvii. p. 524. 

2 lb. eclvii. pp. 1 209- 10. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 417 

This was an argument which carried great weight with 
the House of Commons, and unquestionably it was the argu- 
ment that finally induced Mr. Forster's colleagues to accept 
Coercion. It is not denied that Coercion was not resolved 
upon till towards the close of the year, and it is perfectly 
evident from the speeches of Ministers that what finally 
turned their hesitating minds in favour of Mr. Forster's 
demands were the figures he was able to show of steady and 
gigantic increase of crime. And the figures certainly were 
sufficiently startling. The total for September 1880 was 167; 
in October the total had risen to 268, in November to 561, 
and in December it had reached 867. 

With this part of Mr. Forster's case I will not deal just 
for the moment. The outrages for the year 1880 were 
published in Blue Books, giving the crimes for each month of 
the year separately. The first Blue Book was not produced 
at the opening of the Session, nor for several days after ; it 
was produced at a time when the case of Ireland had already 
been decided. The story of the Blue Books I will tell a few 
paragraphs later on ; and then it will be seen that the case 
for the increase of crime in the latter half of 1880, and in the 
months of October, November, and December, was just as 
much without real foundation, and was as much a tissue of 
misrepresentation and false pretences, as the representation 
that 1880 was remarkable for the depth of its criminality 
above all years from 1844. With the year 1880 considerably 
under the total of the previous year's murders, and immensely 
under the total of that of many other years, by what means 
did Mr. Forster succeed in fooling a body of intelligent men 
into the belief that Ireland was, in that year, a perfect pande- 
monium of hideous and revolting crime ? 

Mr. Forster's chief device was to select some special and 
isolated case of horrible ill-usage, and represent this as of 
constant occurrence, and typical of the general condition of 
the country. For instance, in one of his effective asides he 
described ' carding ' : — 

I do not know (he said) whether honourable members know 
what carding means, and perhaps I had better explain it. An iron 



418 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

comb used for agricultural purposes is applied to a man's naked 
body, and the torture must be very great. 1 

The sentence in which he introduces this description will 
sufficiently prove that he meant to indicate that ' carding ' 
was an extremely common occurrence. 

A disguised party of men (he said), consisting of ten, twenty, or 
even more, come to a lone farmhouse at night, drag the farmer out 
of bed, beat him, and card him. 

And he then went on after his dexterous aside : — 

Then the man is threatened and warned against disobeying the 
orders of the organisation any longer. Shots are fired over his head, 
and sometimes at him. Let hon. members think of the terrors thus 
produced. Imagine a small farmer in a desolate situation — his 
house on the side of some hill, or near some bog. There is no help 
near • no police-station is at hand ; and the man himself is powerless 
to resist. Naturally, he submits to this cruel tyranny and intimida- 
tion. And no wonder, when such things as these are taking place, 
that the hon. member for Tipperary (Mr. Dillon) is right, and that 
the Land League reigns supreme. 2 

What will be thought of the candour of the Chief Secre- 
tary in making such a representation when he said that in the 
Blue Book containing the crimes from February, 1880, to 
October, 1880, there is, in the whole total of 1,048 crimes, 
just one single instance of ' carding ? ' 

But in the absence of murders, and with but one case of 
' carding,' Mr. Forster had plenty of stories with regard to the 
mutilation of cattle. The Chief Secretary relied on the fact 
that the story of such offences would have extraordinary 
effect upon an audience of Englishmen. It was curious that 
these stories seemed far more deeply to impress the House of 
Commons than the stories of outrages upon human beings ; 
and that while Irish members, detailing cases in which men and 
women and children were turned out of their homes amidst 
every surrounding circumstance of horror and cruelty, preached 
either to empty benches or were constantly and rudely inter- 
rupted, the story of the houghing of one heifer or the pluck- 
ing of hair from a horse's tail was listened to with hushed at- 
tention and produced exclamations of violent horror. There 

1 Hansard, cclvii. p. 121 2. 2 lb. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 419 

is no doubt that a few outrages upon animals had almost 
as much influence in obtaining Coercion for Mr. Forster 
as the worst case of crime he could bring against persons. 

When Mr. Forster had exhausted his harrowing descrip- 
tion of these outrages upon animals, what was the dread total 
he had to bring of such cases before Parliament ? ' In 1880/ 
he said, ' the number of cases of maiming cattle amounted 
to 10 1. ' 1 With similar reasonableness Sir Charles Dilke, in 
a speech made during the recess, had suggested the neces- 
sity of Coercion from the fact that in ten months of 1 880 
there had been 47 cases of maiming or killing animals. Forty- 
seven outrages on animals in ten months, 10 1 in twelve — a 
small total to destroy a nation's liberties ! In 1876 there were 
in England 2,468 convictions for cruelty to animals ; in 1877, 
2,726; in 1878, 3,533. In the very month of November of 
1880, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 
was able to advertise 323 convictions, or more than three 
times the number of cases in all Ireland for the entire year. 
If the liberties of England were at the mercy of an ignorant 
and hostile opinion in Ireland, one can well imagine how, by 
a judicious manipulation of these statistics, the habits of the 
English people might be falsely illustrated to the Irish people 
as those of a nation of savages and monsters. 

There was one device finally. It was the foundation of 
the whole case of the Chief Secretary that his legislation was 
directed, not against the Land League as an organisation, 
nor against the masses of the Irish people. If he had put 
the case thus nakedly, the House might have paused before 
placing the liberties of a nation at the disposal of the Lord- 
Lieutenant. His whole cue was that the Act was directed 
against the few criminals who with their own hands perpe- 
trated these outrages : the Bills, in fact, were in defence of the 
nation generally against a few criminals among its popula- 
tion. Answering the argument that they ought to have in- 
troduced Land Reform before Coercion, the Chief Secretary 
said : ' My answer is that the Irish people cannot wait for pro- 
tection, and they ought not to wait for protection.' 2 The 
criminals, on the other hand, were 'village tyrants,' the 
1 Hansard, cclvii. p. 121 1. 2 Iu. p. 1235. 



420 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

' manvais sujets ' of their neighbourhood ; the ' contemptible, 
dissolute ruffian and blackguard,' who was ' shunned by every 
respectable man.' ' 

This miserable minority, too, of persons who committed 
outrages were well known to the police. 

It is not (said Mr. Forster) that the police do not know who these 
village tyrants are. The police know perfectly well who plan and 
perpetrate these outrages, and the perpetrators are perfectly aware of 
the fact that they are known. 2 

The moment the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, these 
men would either fly the country, or be arrested. 

The men who plan and execute these outrages desist from fear of 
being arrested. They are aware that the police know who they are. 
My belief is that if you pass this Act you will cause an immense 
diminution of crime. 3 

It will be seen later on in what shameful difference was the 
application of the Coercion Act and the limitation by the 
Chief Secretary of the persons to whom it should apply, and 
in what grotesque and horrible contrast were his expectations 
of what the fruits of Coercion would be and what the fruits 
of Coercion really were. 

On the night following the introduction of the Coercion 
Bill — Tuesday, January 25 — was enacted the first of the 
more passionate scenes by which this strange and fierce 
session was characterised. Mr. Gladstone moved that the 
Coercion Bill should have precedence of all other business. 
This roused Mr. Biggar, who, in opposing the motion, came 
into collision with the Chair, and was named and suspended. 
The Irish members regarded the action of the Speaker as 
unjust, and at once proceeded to offer violent opposition to 
further progress. Mr. Healy immediately moved the ad- 
journment of the debate, but the Government refused to 
accede to the motion, and after some discussion the Irish 
members proceeded once more to argue upon Mr. Gladstone's 
original proposal. This went quietly until about half-past 
twelve, and then it was proposed that the adjournment 
should take place. But by this time passion had become so 
1 Hansard, cclvii. pp. 1226-7. 2 lb. p. 1226. s lb. p. 1231. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 421 

violently excited that the Prime Minister was carried away, 
and declared that the House would not be permitted to 
adjourn until his motion of precedence was carried. This 
led to a wrangle which was prolonged through the night. 
The Irish members were left to continue the discussion almost 
alone. The Government had divided their forces into relays, 
and the long hours of the night passed wearily enough, and 
it was not until the morning that a slight support was given 
by the arrival of some of the members who had gone home 
to bed. The sitting was continued in this form until 
two o'clock on Wednesday, when the House adjourned till 
Thursday. 

Meantime a very important event had happened. The 
returns on which Mr. Forster had founded his claim for 
Coercion were distributed among members for the first time 
on the morning of the day on which he asked leave to in- 
troduce his Coercion Bill. On these returns the Irish mem- 
bers at once fastened. They endeavoured to attract the 
attention of the Government and of the House to some of 
their startling revelations ; but, in the course of such a fight 
as that of the twenty-two hours' sitting, allusions to any such 
subject passed unheeded ; and by this time the House had 
generally made up its mind to pay no attention whatever 
to any representations from the Irish benches. But when 
the discussion of Mr. Forster's proposal was resumed on 
Thursday evening, January 27, the analysis of the Returns 
was in the hands of an able and skilful assailant in the 
person of Mr. Henry Labouchere. He went through the 
Returns and exposed astonishing cases of multiplication and 
exaggeration. Mr. Labouchere picked out some of the most 
amusing ; and his speech was a great success. ■ 

In truth, the Returns were so full of incredible absurdities, 
that several speakers freely resorted to them, certain that 
quotations from them would be sure to enliven the dulness of 
the House. This is the very first outrage that stood in the 
Book :— 

A portion of the front wall of an old unoccupied thatched cabin 
was maliciously thrown down, in consequence of which the roof 
fell in. 



422 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The 8th outrage reported for the West Riding of Co. 
Cork was thus described : — 

A wooden gate broken up with stones, and half an iron gate 
taken away, the property of W. S. Bateman. 

Here is the 4th outrage reported for the North Riding 
of Co. Tipperary : — 

A small wooden gate, the property of Lord Dunally, was taken 
off its hinges, brought into a field, and broken with large stones. 

The 41st outrage reported in the County Cavan is as 
follows : — 

Several panes of glass were maliciously broken in the windows of 
an unoccupied house. 

Here is the 6th outrage reported for the County 
Derry : — 

Three perches of a wall maliciously thrown down. 

Here is the 100th outrage in the West Riding of Co. 

Galway : — 

A barrel of coal tar maliciously spilled. 

These discoveries of the true character of the outrages 
by which Mr. Forster had been able to draw his lurid picture 
of the state of Ireland were sufficiently startling ; but a more 
bewildering and a more disturbing discovery was the manner 
in which one offence was manufactured into several. Some- 
times the one outrage was made to do duty for two or more. 
Thus in page 120 of the Return an outrage in the Co. Mayo 
is described as follows : — 

A party of men came to Tighe's house at night, and warned him 
that they would kill him unless he gave up a meadow which he 
bought. 

Same party before leaving broke Tighe's window. 

This occurrence figures as two outrages. As ' intimida- 
tion ' it is outrage No. 104 ; as injury to property, it is out- 
rage No. 105. 

In the same page of the Return there are these two sepa- 
rate records : — 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 



423 



Mr. Walsh was fired at when returning from his lodge from 
Achill Sound, by one of four men whom he passed on the road ; he 
was not injured. 

And:— 

Mr. Walsh, when fired at, at once dismounted from his horse, 
and, while doing so, was struck with a stick and knocked down. 

This occurrence also figures as two outrages. As ' firing 
at the person,' it is outrage No. no ; as 'aggravated assault,' 
it is outrage No. in. 

Sometimes the same occurrence is manufactured into five 
crimes, thus : — 



No. of 
Outrage 


Names of injured 
persons 


Offence : 
Description 


Short details 


87 


Thomas R. Talbot 


Taking and 


Mr. Talbot took a farm from 




and caretakers. 


holding for- 


which James Murphy (accused) 






cible posses- 
sion. 


was evicted, and placed care- 
takers in charge of it. About 


88 
89 


Ditto. 
Ditto. 


Administering 
unlawful oaths. 
Assault on care- 


2 A.M. an armed party forcibly 
reinstated Murphy and family, 
swore him not to leave it, as- 






takers. 


saulted caretakers, set fire to 


90 
9i 


Di'to. 
Ditto. 


Incendiary fire. 
Robbery of arms. 


about 60/. woith of property, 
and robbed the caretakers of 
their arms — three loaded guns. ' 



A similar case is that of the Horgans, in page 50 of 
the Return, outrages No. 137, 138, and 139, for the West 
Riding of the Co. Galway, are thus given : — 

No. 137. — A number of men entered Coyne's dwelling-house by 
force. 

No. 138. — The above party dragged Coyne out of bed and 
assaulted him. 

No. 139. — Same time and place, cautioned Coyne not to pay his 
rent ; they broke the glass in a window, spilled a churn of milk, and 
demanded the original of a process which he had served on an 
under-tenant for rent, which was the motive for these outrages. 

And finally, that grotesque absurdity might reach its cli- 
max, an assault by a man is represented as one outrage, and 
then the assault on him by those whom he attacked figures 
as another. Here is the entry : — 

1 Return, Agrarian Crime (Ireland), pait i. p. 54. 



424 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



No. of 
Outrage 


Date 


Names of injured 
persons 


Nature of 
offence 


Short details 


36 

37 


April 3 
April 3 


Margaret Lydon 
Patt Whalen 
Bridget Whalen 

John Lydon 


Aggravated 
assault. 

Ditto. 


A dispute arose about the pos- 
session of a small plot of 
ground. John Lydon as- 
saulted the injured persons. 

Lydon was assaulted at the 
time of the above dispute 
about the land. ' 



When the Returns for November and December were 
published, a considerable time afterwards, there were the same 
extraordinary phenomena. 

In page 1 5 of the Return for November, the 9th crime 
is : — 

At an early hour four locks were maliciously broken off gates at 
James Fenton's farm. 

In page 39, the 7th crime and outrage in the County of 
Tipperary is thus described : — 

On the night of the 20th November the windows of the injured 
man's house were broken, and the tops knocked off two corn ricks. 

The 9th outrage on the same page is thus described : — 

Four panes of glass were broken in the injured man's house on 
the night of the 20th November. 

In the Return for December, in page 9, the second crime 
and outrage in the King's County is in these words : — 

The head of a large cock of hay, the property of Mr. Gaynor, was 
knocked off, causing considerable damage to the hay ; also an iron 
gate was carried away and his cattle driven into the road. 

In page 43 the 83rd agrarian outrage was described : — 
Three beehives and some shrubs were maliciously injured. 

It would be rash to say that, if these false Returns had been 
presented to Parliament at an early period of the session, 
they would have largely increased the number of opponents 
to Coercion ; but if, at the time of the struggle within the 
bosom of the Cabinet itself for and against the adoption of 

1 Return, Agrarian Crime (Ireland), part. i. p. 54. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 425 

repressive measures, Mr. Forster had not confined himself 
to laying before his colleagues the simple total of increased 
crimes, it seems hardly open to doubt that the opponents of 
Coercion would have been able to continue their resistance. 
That he submitted only the totals to his colleagues was 
clearly manifest. During the delivery of Mr. Labouchere's 
speech the face of the Prime Minister grew clouded and 
disturbed. He asked for the Returns just published, and 
was observed to scan them eagerly and anxiously. The 
time had passed at which he could allow his mind to be any 
longer influenced by the arguments drawn from them or from 
anything else ; but the utter weakness of the defence of these 
Returns, which he afterwards made, is sufficient evidence of the 
convincing indictment which he would have been able to have 
made from the same materials if Coercion had been the pro- 
posal, not of himself, but of a Tory Ministry, and had no other 
evidence than these Returns been available. 

And yet it was not too late to turn back. The meeting 
of Parliament had produced an extraordinary change in Ire- 
land. Disturbance had greatly diminished, and the first 
weeks of January were weeks almost unstained by crime. 

The number of outrages for December were 867, while in 
January they had fallen to 448. In the first fourteen days of 
the month of January there was not one murder, not one case 
of manslaughter, not one of cutting or maiming ; there were 
but four cases of attacking houses, two of firing at persons, 
but one assault endangering life, and one aggravated assault. 1 

But here again, if the Premier had been inclined to retrace 
the false and fatal steps which he had already taken, Mr. 
Forster was by his side with an argument, loudly applauded 
at the time, but strangely insufficient to the judgment of to- 
day. 

Already we see signs of a diminution in the number of outrages. 
I trust the House will not for a moment suppose that because of 
the lull .... this power should not be given to Her Majesty's 
Government. They could not by any possibility make a greater 
mistake. Hesitation would now make matters worse than ever. If 
. . . after saying that we will take power to arrest the men who 

1 Mr. Labouchere : Hansard, vol. cclvii. p. 15 17. 



426 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

commit these crimes, the House is misled and gives up its intention, 
we shall be considered as having uttered an empty threat, and these 
criminals will be more powerful in Ireland than they ever have been 
before. 1 

The debate went on, but no attempt whatever was made 
on any side to answer the damaging criticism of the Returns. 
Mr. Bright had no better reply to make to Mr. Labouchere's 
destructive analysis than to say that he had delivered a speech 
' that was in many parts interesting and in some parts amus- 
ing ; ' 2 and the comment of the ' Daily News ' was that the 
member for Northampton had given some ' few but amusing 
instances of the misapplication of the term " agrarian out- 
rages " from the Returns presented to the House.' The ma'n 
contribution of the member for Birmingham to the debate 
was that a Coercion Act ' becomes a tyranny in the hands of 
tyrants.' But, he went on, ' in the hands of men who are 
liberal and just it may be a law of protection and of great 
mercy to Ireland ;' 3 and when this strange claim met with 
indignant denials from the Irish benches he challenged his 
interrupters to deny that his colleagues, including Mr. Forster, 
were men who had ' devoted their lives to the cause of free- 
dom.' 4 

Mr. Gladstone spoke on the third mgnt of the debate. He 
made no real attempt to justify the Returns. He even made 
the astonishing confession that he had not 'any particular 
acquaintance ' with them. This confession proves clearly that 
Mr. Forster had obtained Coercion by false pretences to his 
colleagues ; it shows that he made them acquainted with the 
rough totals of the outrages only, and never even hinted that 
these totals had been made up by the multiplication of one 
offence into seven ; and that outrages covered offences so 
heinous as the removal of three yards of a wall or a few 
pounds of hay. The hopelessness of the case for the Returns 
was best illustrated by the fact that the Prime Minister had 
to resort to the extraordinary assertion that the Blue Book 
had rather understated than overstated the outrage-s, because, 
there being twenty-one persons charged out of a large crowd 

' Hansard, vol. cclvii. p. 1231. 2 lb. p. 1562. 3 lb. p. 1563. * lb. p. 1564. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 427 

who assaulted the police, the outrages were put down as one 
instead of as twenty-one. 1 But the most remarkable part of 
Mr. Gladstone's speech was that in which he defined the 
persons against whom the proposed legislation would be em- 
ployed. He denied, in the most strenuous manner, that the 
Bill was aimed against the Land League, or ' any other person 
or body of persons in Ireland.' ' We aim by this Bill, and 
aim solely, at the perpetrators and abettors of outrage.' 2 

I stand (said Mr. Gladstone) upon the words of the legislation 
we propose, and I say that they do not in the slightest degree justify 
the suspicion that we are interfering with the liberty of discussion. I 
will go further. We are not attempting to interfere with the license 
of discussion. There is no interference here with the liberty to pro- 
pose the most subversive and revolutionary changes. There is no 
interference here with the right of associating in the furtherance of 
those changes, provided the furtherance is by peaceful means. 
There is no interference here with whatever right hon. gentlemen may 
think they possess to recommend, and to bring about, not only 
changes of the law, but in certain cases breaches of positive contract. I 
am not stating these things as a matter of boast, I am stating them 
as matter of fact. I must say it appears to me that it is a very 
liberal state of law which permits hon. gentlemen to meet together to 
break a contract into which they have entered! 6 

It is well to quote these words, because it was on descrip- 
tions like this and statements like this that the consent of 
Parliament was granted to the enactment of coercive legisla- 
tion. The words have, indeed, a strange sound now, in face 
of our knowledge of the purpose to which the Coercion Act 
was applied. 

The speech of the Prime Minister created extraordinary 
enthusiasm. It was interrupted at almost every point by the 
combined cheers of Liberals and Conservatives. The news- 
papers complimented him upon the unimpaired vigour of 
which it was the proof. Mr. Parnell, attempting once or twice 
to correct the allusions to himself, was swept to his seat 

1 ' Twenty-one persons were charged out of a large crowd who assaulted the 
police. Their cases weie various, and were dealt with variously. Some were 
detained only for a short time, some went before the magistrates, some to the 
assizes. The whole of that is put down as one outrage.' — Hansard, vol. cclvii. 
p. 1685. 2 lb. p. 16S6. 3 lb. 16S6-7. 



428 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

amid the thunderstorm of shouts by which he was received. 
After a while, the House had reason to repent of its pre- 
cipitancy. 

The Prime Minister was contending that Mr. Parnell had 
called upon the people to boycott any man who took a farm 
from which another had been evicted ; and Mr. Parnell, over 
and over again, insisted that he had qualified the sentiment 
by using the words ' unjustly evicted.' Mr. Gladstone per- 
sisted in the declaration that the qualifying word was not 
inserted, and while the dispute was going on the Chief 
Secretary placed in the Prime Minister's hands the copy of a 
speech. The Premier looked at the document, and then read 
out these words, ' That if a man occupies a farm from which 
any man has been evicted ' — and then he added, at the very 
top of his voice, and with every auxiliary of look and 
gesture — ' from whatever cause ; ' and the House, regarding 
the member for Cork as finally pinned, cheered itself hoarse. 
' Unjustly evicted,' interrupted Mr. Parnell. But Mr. Glad- 
stone would not listen to him. 'These are the words,' he 
exclaimed, ' sworn to in court ; they were not shaken in court, 
and if there had been an attempt to shake them those who 
attempted to shake .them would have been subjected to cross- 
examination.' l And having thus worked himself into a still 
hotter passion by his own language, after his characteristic 
fashion, Mr. Gladstone went on amid the still increasing cheers : 
' These are the words which are so declared to have been used, 
and irrespective of the cause, the circumstances, the character of 
the proceeding,'^ is characterised as a detestable crime, deserv- 
ing of complete isolation from all human kind, for any man 
to enter upon a farm from which another man, for whatever 
reason, has been evicted.' And then he went on to quote 
another passage from a speech which he declared Mr. Parnell 
had delivered in Galway : ' Let no man take a farm, no matter 
what has been the cause — let no man take a farm from which 
a man has been evicted ; let him be looked upon as a leper 
whenever you meet him in the street' 2 Again Mr. Parnell 
endeavoured to interfere, but once more the House rose at 
him ; and the Speaker, making himself the interpreter of the 

1 Hansard, cclvii. pp. 1^92-3. 2 lb. pp. 1693-4. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 429 

general passion, severely called him to order. Thus the 
Prime Minister was supposed to have completely proved his 
case under one of the most important heads of the indictment. 
But a few days afterwards Mr. Forster had to write a letter 
of apology to Mr. Farnell, and was compelled to acknowledge 
that the speech which he had pu^ into the hands of Mr. Glad- 
stone as having been delivered by Mr. Parnell was in reality 
the speech of another person altogether. This is a fair 
specimen of the intelligent temper in which the Coercion 
debates were conducted. 

One of the most painful and even disgusting experiences 
of the Coercion struggle was the manner in which, in the face 
of public passion in England and the appeals of the Ministers, 
the Radicals deserted their pledges to Ireland. After some 
days of hesitation at the beginning of the Parliament, they 
almost one and all fled, and their speeches in defence of their 
change of attitude perhaps made their action the more dis- 
gusting, by the Pharisaic declarations of sympathy with 
Ireland. 

No man (says Serjeant Simon) will doubt then, I hope, my 
sympathy with the Irish people and with their just claims, or the 
sincerity of my feelings when I say that my position at this moment 
is one of the deepest sorrow to me. But (went on the Radical 
member for Dewsbury), painful as it is, I have a solemn duty before 
me, 1 and acccordingly, with the deepest regret, I feel bound to 
support Her Majesty's Government. 2 

Mr. William Fowler ' acknowledged that the history of 
Ireland had been a sad and a gloomy history, mainly owing 
to the cruelties of the English Parliament in past centuries 
. . . but it was not the present Parliament that was to 
blame, but generations long passed away.' 3 And accord- 
ingly Mr. Fowler, ' having entire confidence in Her Majesty's 
Government, should give his vote in support of the motion of 
the right hon. gentleman.' 4 Mr. W. H. Leatham ' could bear 
testimony to the warm expressions of sympathy which existed 
in South Yorkshire to Ireland, but he could not help feel- 

1 Hansard, eclvii. p. 1528. 2 lb. p. 1536. 

3 lb. p. 1576. * lb. pp. 1579-1580. 



430 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

ing that the Government had shown the greatest forbearance, 
for the law must be maintained.' l Accordingly Mr. Leatham 
' should, however reluctantly, as regarded the Coercion Bill, 
support the Government' 2 And finally Mr. Broadhurst, the 
representative of those masses in whose friendship to Ireland 
Irishmen were asked to believe, declared with regard to 
the opposition to the Coercion Bill, ' There was hardly a heart 
in that locality that was not with it ; but unfortunately, this 
was an occasion when hearts would be in one lobby and 
heads in another.' 3 ' During the last six years,' went on the 
working man's member, ' no practical attempt whatever had 
been made to deal with the wrongs of the long-suffering 
people of Ireland ' 4 . . . but, nevertheless, ' relying upon states- 
men who had never yet failed, he confidently upon this occa- 
sion placed faith in their promises of justice,' and, therefore, 
' he should unquestionably support the measure for the in- 
troduction of which leave had been asked.' 5 

The debate was resumed on Monday, January 31. The 
sitting began in considerable excitement. The text of the Co- 
ercion Bill had been by some accident prematurely published ; 
there was a rumour of the letter of apology that had been sent 
to Mr. Parnell, and altogether the House presented an appear- 
ance of gathering trouble and electric expectation. There was, 
too, an expectation that the Government were determined to 
force the first stage of the Bill through that night. Mr. Glad- 
stone had come down early, looking at once fierce and worn. 
The Return of the outrage: for November — which, it will be re- 
membered, was part of the material by which Mr. Forster ought 
to have induced his colleagues to adopt the policy of coercion 
■ — was still unpublished, and Mr. Parnell naturally asked 
whether the second reading of the Bill would be taken before 
the House was put in possession and had time to study these 
new Returns. The reply of the Premier was that they in- 
tended to proceed with the Bill from day to day ; that the 
second reading would be taken immediately after the stage 
of introduction, and that that stage would, he hoped, be voted 
by the House in the course of that sitting. The Prime 

1 Hansard, eclvii. p. 1672. 8 lb. 3 lb. p. 1784. 

* lb. 1785. 5 lb. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 431 

Minister made this announcement with that pride which apes 
humility ; he threw the statement off, as it were, carelessly ; 
but there was a portentous underswell in his voice which 
showed the supreme importance he attached to it. The 
Liberals, of course, understood the mot d'ordre of the speech, 
and loudly cheered ; the Conservatives, equally exasperated 
against the Irish, and equally delighted at the show of vigour 
by the Government, shouted their applause, and the small 
Parnellite band, quite as quick as anybody else to see the dire 
significance of the Premier's announcement, set up a cry not 
as loud but quite as defiant as any that had come from either 
of the other parties. 

The debate resumed its course with apparent placidity. 
The House was almost empty during the whole evening, 
and, with the exception of Mr. Russell, there was no speaker 
of any particular importance throughout. It was not until 
one o'clock that the contest began. At that hour the 
usual motion for adjournment was made. The reply of the 
Prime Minister was laconic and emphatic. ' I beg to say,' 
he answered, ' on the part of the Government, that we pro- 
pose to resist that motion.' ' The strange calm that had 
reigned over the House during the evening was now broken. 
Passion was let loose, and active steps were taken on both 
sides for hot and sharp encounter. The Ministerialists on 
their side had begun their preparations for the coming 
contest at an early hour. About half-past ten there began 
to be a gradual melting away of the House, and there were 
left no more than half a score of the dullest and drowsiest, 
the most reticent and most docile members of the Ministerial 
party. Of the men thus told off to remain through the sit- 
ting, the majority left the House and were lost to observation 
in the various departments of the building ; those who re- 
mained in their seats belonged, for the most part, to the 
younger members of the party, passed the night in a merry 
mood, cracking jokes of varying degrees of taste on the 
speeches of the Irish members, and occasionally paying a 
visit either to the dining-rooms or the bars to recruit the 
nature which, in persons of their age and type, becomes so 

1 Hansard, cclvii. p. 1809. 



432 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

frequently exhausted. The Irish members now found that 
they had a task of considerable difficulty, for their numbers 
were so small that they could not resort to the system of 
relays which had been employed by the Government. But 
they settled down steadily to their work, and followed each 
other in the empty House in monotonous succession. During 
the first night the proceedings were not ill-humoured on either 
side. Mr. Biggar was grotesquely humorous after his fashion, 
and the few English members in the House sympathised with 
his mood. When he declared that the Irish members were 
accused of wasting time, there came from English members 
a deprecatory ' No, no,' whereupon the member for Cavan 
beamed on the House and the House beamed back upon the 
member for Cavan. 

The struggle continued all through Tuesday, Dr. Lyon 
Playfair taking the place of the Speaker when the latter be- 
came exhausted. The Irish members were constantly called 
to order, and the one voice raised during this sitting in their 
favour was that of Mr. T. C. Thompson, who declared that 
Parliament was not ruled by physical force, and that the 
band of members on the other side were justified in contend- 
ing as they had done for the liberties of their country. 
Throughout the discussion there were constant allusions to the 
new volume of Returns that had just been produced by Mr. 
Forster, these being found to contain the same extraordinary 
multiplication of offences as the October volume. But by 
this time Returns and everything were forgotten, and the Irish 
members were allowed to carry on the debate unassisted by 
a single speech in reply. 

About eleven o'clock on Tuesday night an appeal was 
made by Sir Richard Cross, on the part of the Conservatives, 
to the Speaker to put in use the rule against wilful obstruc- 
tion. The Speaker did not think the time had come for 
putting this rule into operation, but at the same time hinted 
very plainly that in his view there was very strong evidence 
of ' combination for the purpose of wilful and persistent ob- 
struction.' This was a new reading of the rule passed against 
obstruction. That rule, as hitherto understood, was intended 
for application against an individual member alone ; but the 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 433 

statement of the Speaker suggested that it might be employed 
against several members at a time. After giving this ruling, 
Mr. Brand retired from the Chair, and Dr. Lyon Playfair 
again took his place. For a while the point as to ' obstruc- 
tion ' was dropped, but soon Sir Stafford Northcote came 
forward, and again urged the Chair to deal summarily with 
the Irish members. Mr. Childers accepted the view of Sir 
Stafford Northcote, and declared that if the Deputy-Speaker 
should take action against the offenders he would have the 
hearty support of the Government. But Dr. Playfair still 
refused to take action ; and when, finally, an appeal was made 
to him by Sir Stafford Northcote to name Mr. Parnell, and he 
still refused to act, Sir Stafford and the Conservative party 
left the House in a body. The night was marked by some 
scenes of passion. Between Mr. Milbank and Mr. Biggar 
there was a fierce exchange of personalities. Mr. Biggar 
was accused by Mr. Milbank— but it appeared afterwards 
unjustly — of describing him as a fool ; and Mr. Milbank had 
to confess to applying the epithet 'damned scoundrel' to 
the member for Cavan. 

The Irish members now changed their course, and, aban- 
doning any further motions for adjournment, proceeded to 
debate the main question — which was an amendment on the 
part of Dr. Lyons in opposition to Mr. Forster's demand for 
leave to introduce the Coercion Bill. Each member spoke at 
the greatest length that either his physical or his mental re- 
sources would permit. Under this change the House became 
transformed ; the heat and excitement of a crowded Chamber 
gave place to the languor, silence, and calm consistent with a 
House of but eight or nine members, most of them either 
fast asleep or in broken slumber. The visitors, whose at- 
tendance throughout the scene had been marvellously 
regular, broke down under disappointment of the hope of 
further excitement ; the Ladies' Gallery became absolutely 
deserted, there were vacancies even in the Strangers' Gallery, 
which had up to this remained crowded, and but one or 
two persons remained in the gallery for distinguished stran- 
gers. The mournful silence of the Chamber was broken 
only by the voice of the Irish member and the snore of a 



434 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

sleepy member. It was something of a relief to the dread 
quiet when Sir William Harcourt now and then carried on a 
low but audible conversation with some of his colleagues. It 
was on this morning that Mr. Sexton delivered the second of 
the remarkable speeches by which he was at last forcing him- 
self into the position of one of the most adroit and most 
eloquent orators of the House. He spoke from a quarter to 
five until twenty minutes to eight. This speech, delivered to 
an audience of seven or eight people, nearly every one of them 
in a state of complete or partial slumber, was complete in 
every one of its sentences, had every idea well worked out, 
every word happily chosen. Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, one of the 
few representatives of the Ministry who remained on the 
Treasury Bench throughout the night, afterwards declared 
that he had listened to every word that Mr. Sexton had 
uttered, and that there was not throughout it all a superfluous 
syllable. 

Meantime other Irish members were preparing to follow, 
and to continue the struggle as long as their physical strength 
would hold out. Some of them had taken broken snatches 
of sleep while one of their comrades was speaking, and at this 
time were sluicing off in the lavatories around the House 
the fatigues of the night. Inside and outside the House a 
state of electrical excitement prevailed that can only be 
appreciated by those who passed through these scenes. 
There were affrighting whispers of what might be done by 
savage mobs of Englishmen on the one side, by Irish des- 
peradoes on the other. Some of the Irish members had been 
subjected to a certain amount of inconvenience as they walked 
home in the early hours of the morning. No one, in fact, 
knew what was going to happen, but everybody had a vague 
feeling that something was about to occur, and something of 
a startling character. Inside the House there was a vague 
suspicion of an impending catastrophe. An English member 
informed Mr. Sexton, when the member for Sligo, after his 
speech, dragged himself down to the smoking-room, that 
'something' would take place at nine o'clock. 

Mr. Leamy followed Mr. Sexton, and about a quarter to 
nine Mr. Biggar stood up. Meantime there were many signs 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 435 

that the dreaded ' something ' was about to take place. As 
if by some mysterious and occult influence, the House filled 
with extraordinary rapidity. As the clock approached the 
hour of nine, Dr. (now Sir Lyon) Playfair began to look very 
anxious and expectant. Mr. Gladstone and Sir Stafford 
Northcote had come in, and at nine o'clock the Speaker 
made his appearance. He was received with a burst of 
enthusiastic cheers, and it was evident from the benches on 
both sides, which were now almost crowded, that both the 
English parties had been told of what was about to come. 
Mr. Biggar had resumed his seat when the Speaker came in, 
and now rose to continue his speech, but the Speaker, who 
had entered with an air of strange determination, and with 
an ominous roll of paper in his hand, remained standing and 
refused to see the member for Cavan. He then read the 
historic declaration that he would now close the discussion. 
Each sentence of his speech was received with boisterous ap- 
plause from both Liberals and Conservatives. It is still 
painful to recall the looks of furious hate with which the 
English members looked towards the Irish benches. Mean- 
time, the latter were without the assistance of their leader, 
for Mr. Parnell had gone to snatch a few hours' sleep at the 
Westminster Palace Hotel close by. Their hasty consultation 
was not concluded when the Speaker had put the question 
whether Mr. Forster's motion or Dr. Lyons' amendment should 
be accepted. In the midst of this uncertainty the precious 
seconds passed away. At last the doors of the House were 
closed, and nothing remained but to take part in the division. 
In sullenness and silence on both sides the division was taken. 
It was noticeable that, as the members passed each other to 
go into the different lobbies, there was not even a single ex- 
change of the passing word between men of the opposite 
camps which usually relieves in an agreeable manner the con- 
flict of parties. The Speaker then announced the numbers : 
For the original question, 164; against, 19; majority for 
the Government, 145. 

The Speaker immediately afterwards proposed to put the 
original question, that leave be given to bring in the Bill. 
Mr. Justin McCarthy, as deputy-chairman of the party, rose 



436 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

to protest. The Speaker took no notice, and the member for 
Longford and he were standing and speaking at the same 
time, but not a word of either could be heard. The Irish 
representative was met with a storm of interruption which 
was almost deafening. Mr. McCarthy, with a tranquil and 
resolute smile, still held his ground. By a happy inspiration 
the Irish members determined not to go through the farce of 
a second division. First two, then two or three more, and 
finally all of them jumped to their feet, raised their hands — 
in most cases clenched in passion— and shouted ' Privilege ! 
privilege ! ' for several seconds, many shaking their clenched 
fists with desperate anger, and moving their lips as if they 
were accompanying these menacing gestures with words of 
violence. The members of the Government looked a little 
startled for the moment, Mr. Gladstone being notably pale 
and disturbed. The Speaker still remained standing, saying 
nothing, and the House became somewhat less vehement. 
At last the Irish members brought the painful incident to a 
conclusion by walking out of the House in single file, Mr. 
McCarthy leading the way, and bowing to the Speaker as 
they left. Some of the younger members of the House 
slightly cheered, but the Assembly generally remained silent. 
Then the original question was put, and it was carried with- 
out dissent. Immediately afterwards enthusiasm and excite- 
ment once more broke forth, and the cheering became still 
louder when Mr. Forster, in the usual manner, walked up the 
floor of the House from the bar with his Bill in his hand. 
Then there was a renewal of cheers when the measure passed 
its first reading without any dissent, and the sitting, after its 
forty-one hours' duration, ended with a notice of motion by 
Mr. Gladstone of his intention to propose the new rules of 
urgency. 

The Irish members retired from the House to the con- 
ference-room, to consider their course of action. They had 
scarcely arrived there when Mr. Parnell, to whom Mr. Healy 
had conveyed the news of these stirring events, entered. He 
wore his usual placid smile ; but his followers, hot from their 
wild encounter, under the influence of one of those crises 
which draw tight the ties between leader and followers, burst 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 437 

into spontaneous cheers. The Irish party was young in those 
days, and this fact will account for their gravely discussing 
one of the most foolish propositions ever submitted to a body 
of politicians. Mr. O'Connor Power proposed the following 
resolution : — 

That the irregular and unprecedented course adopted by Mr. 
Speaker in summarily closing the debate on the Coercion Bill, by 
which the Irish members have been deprived of the opportunity of 
protesting against the suspension of constitutional liberty in Ireland, 
requires to be taken notice of ; and that a protest, signed by Irish 
members, be forwarded to Mr. Speaker and circulated in the public 
press ; and that we, the Irish members, retire from the House pend- 
ing the result of a consultation with our constituents. 1 

The debate was most interesting and most able. All the 
speakers who took part in it put their cases with vigour, and, 
indeed, in most cases with vehemence. The long vigils of so 
many days and nights had begun to tell on the nerves of 
most of them, and there was a certain shrillness in the voices, 
a certain feverishness in the language and gestures of the 
debaters, that told of systems which had been subjected to 
too severe and too prolonged a strain. But these were the 
very things which lent passion and force to the debate, and 
therefore it is, probably, that it remains so distinctly in the 
memories of all who were present. After a lengthy discus- 
sion, it was decided that it was the duty of the Irish members 
to remain in their places in Parliament and to go on with the 
struggle. Nobody can fail to see that this was the only wise 
decision that could be come to. An American politician is 
credited with the mot, ' Never resign.' Mr. Biggar has con- 
tributed to the Parliamentary catechism the apothegm, 
' Never withdraw,' and probably Mr. Biggar's policy is the 
soundest. Parliament, after all, is the one weak point in the 
armour of the dominant nation, and to abandon the vantage- 
ground where that point can be most effectually hit is to 
gratify and to help the opponents of the Irish cause. 

The coup d'etat of the Speaker was followed almost im- 
mediately by a scene of greater violence and more intense 

1 Freeman's yournal, Feb. 3, 1SS1. 



433 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

passion. The Wednesday immediately following the close of 
the forty-one hours' sitting was again wasted in motions for 
adjournment. Just before the sitting on Thursday there came 
the stunning report that Mr. Davitt had been arrested. Mr. 
Davitt had now been more than three years out of prison. He 
had already, as the reader knows, passed through the hideous 
tortures of seven years' confinement. The Coercion Bill was 
passed soon after this, and though the expectation was 
general that he might be placed under restraint under the 
new legislation, nobody suspected that the Government 
would have proceeded to lengths so great and so shameful 
as to send back to penal servitude one of the leaders of the 
agitation. The news deeply affected Mr. Parnell and the 
other Irish members. When the House met, however, there 
was no indication of the coming storm. Mr. Gladstone was 
asked for a day to discuss a motion condemnatory of the 
action of the Speaker, but his refusal to do so did not appear 
to excite any very strong emotion. Nor was there any re- 
sentment even at the announcement that he was still deter- 
mined not to make known the character of the Land Bill. 
Mr. Parnell rose from his seat in his usual tranquil fashion, 
and asked, in a tone of apparently no great concern, whether 
it was true that Mr. Davitt had been arrested. 'Yes, Sir! ' ' was 
the curt reply of Sir William Harcourt, delivered with much 
emphasis and pomp. Before he could utter another word 
there burst from the Liberal benches, and from the benches 
occupied by the Radicals more vehemently than from any 
other, a tempest of cheers that would have formed a fitting 
welcome to a mighty victor in the field or the accomplish- 
ment of a momentous popular reform. The Conservatives 
joined in the cheer to some extent, but their tone was com- 
paratively mild. The ITome Secretary then said that the 
conduct of Mr. Davitt was not such as to justify his retention 
of his ticket-of-leave. Again the House rang with vociferous 
cheering. Mr. Parnell, with an appearance of great calmness, 
asked what conditions of his ticket-of-leave Mr. Davitt had 
contravened. Sir William Harcourt sat still, and made no 
attempt to answer the question. The Irish party burst into 

1 Hansard, vol. cclviii. p. 6S. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 439 

exclamations of intense anger, but the Home Secretary, fold- 
ing his arms across his breast after his usual fashion, remained 
silent. The Speaker, apparently with a desire to put an end 
to the incident, called upon Mr. Gladstone to rise and propose 
the urgency resolutions. 

But the scene was not thus to terminate. The Prime 
Minister had hardly uttered a word when Mr. Dillon rose. 
The Speaker called upon Mr. Dillon to sit down, and that 
gentleman shouted above the tumult of ' Order ! order ! ' and 
' Name ! name ! ' the words, ' I rise to a point of order.' ' It is 
an invariable rule of every deliberative assembly in the world 
that a member has a right to rise at any moment to a point 
of order ; but the House of Commons had long passed the 
time when such distinctions would be observed, and the 
Speaker resolutely refused to allow Mr. Dillon to proceed. 
Mr. Dillon thereupon folded his arms, and he and the Speaker 
remained standing for some minutes at the same time. At 
last the Speaker was understood to name Mr. Dillon, though 
the decree could not be heard above the wild din. Mr. 
Gladstone immediately proposed the suspension of Mr. Dillon. 
The late Mr. A. M. Sullivan endeavoured to raise a point of 
order, but was not listened to, and the House divided : Ayes, 
395 ; Noes, 33. Mr. Dillon was then called upon to withdraw, 
but he refused to do so, and a noisy scene took place. Then 
the Sergeant-at-Arms invited Mr. Dillon to withdraw, and 
when the latter still refused, the Sergeant again advanced 
with the principal doorkeeper and a number of messengers, 
placed his hand on Mr. Dillon's shoulder, and requested him 
to obey the order of the Speaker. ' If you employ force 
I must yield,' 2 said Mr. Dillon, and then withdrew. 

Mr. Sullivan then attempted to raise the question whether 
the Speaker had acted legally or not. He pointed out the 
right of every member to rise to a point of order, and then 
suggested the contrast between the treatment given to M* 
Bradlaugh when he refused to withdraw, and that meted out 
to Mr. Dillon. Mr. Sullivan found the greatest difficulty in 
proceeding with his speech, for he was interrupted at every 
point. Finally, however, he succeeded in putting his case. 

1 Hansard, vol. cclviii. p. 69. - 77'. p. 70. 



440 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The Speaker then surprised the Irish members by giving a 
wholly different reason to that which was generally accepted 
for the suspension of Mr. Dillon. He adroitly slurred over 
Mr. Dillon's right to rise to a point of order, and based the 
suspension on the fact that Mr. Dillon had remained standing 
at the same time as himself. This, of course, added fuel to the 
flame ; and the Irish members, now convinced that there was 
no chance of any justice being given to them, determined to 
mark the occasion by an incident that could not be for- 
gotten. The Prime Minister had scarcely again risen when 
Mr. Parnell stood up at the same time, and made the motion 
which the Prime Minister himself had made not many months 
before in regard to Mr. O'Donnell — namely, that the right 
honourable gentleman be no longer heard. The Speaker, 
however, refused to accept the motion, and threatened Mr. 
Parnell with suspension in case he continued. Again Mr. 
Gladstone got up, and resumed the sentence which had so 
frequently been interrupted. Mr. Parnell again rose. The 
Speaker declared that the conduct of the member for Cork 
was wilful and deliberate obstruction, and named him. When 
the division took place in the case of Mr. Dillon, the Irish 
members had not yet made up their minds as to what was 
the proper course to adopt ; but by the time that Mr. Parnell 
was named, their tactics had been resolved upon. When the 
division upon Mr. Parnell's suspension was called, they refused 
to quit their seats. The division went on without them, and 
the House presented a curious spectacle with the Speaker 
left alone with the Irish party. The deserted and tranquil 
appearance of the House might have encouraged the illusion 
that the storm of passion had subsided and given place to 
perfect quiet. The Speaker warned the Irish members of the 
consequences that might result upon what they were doing ; 
Mr. Sullivan declared that they contested the legality of the 
proceeding. This exchange of language between the Speaker 
and the Parnellites was mild and courteous. The division 
over, Mr. Parnell was ordered to withdraw ; but he refused 
to go unless compelled by force, and again the Sergeant-at- 
Arms and the messengers came forward and touched his 
shoulder The Irish leader slowly descended the gangway, 




. 3 evo<#0 




J\a^/ 




THE COERCION STRUGGLE 441 

bowed to the Speaker, and walked out of the House with 
head erect and amid the ringing cheers of his supporters. 
Once more Mr. Gladstone resumed the unfortunate sentence, 
that, as he himself said, had been bisected and trisected already ; 
but again he was not allowed to proceed, for Mr. Finigan 
rose and proposed the same motion that Mr. Parnell had pro- 
posed, that the Prime Minister be no longer heard. Once 
more a division was taken, and once more the Irish members 
refused to leave their places. The tellers and clerks took 
down the names of the contumacious members, and after the 
withdrawal of Mr. Finigan the Speaker read out their names 
and suspended them all. The names were — Messrs. Barry, 
Biggar, Byrne, Corbet, Daly, Dawson, Gill, Gray, Healy, 
Lalor, Leamy, Leahy, Justin McCarthy, McCoan, Marum, 
Metge, Nelson, Arthur O'Connor, T. P. O'Connor, The 
O'Donoghue, The O'Gorman Mahon, W. H. O'Sullivan, 
O'Connor Power, Redmond, Sexton, Smithwick, A. M. Sul- 
livan, and T. D. Sullivan. 

By this time the passion of the House was to some extent 
exhausted, and there was even some return of good humour ; 
but Mr. Gladstone remained grave, and proposed the sus- 
pension of the twenty-eight members with an air of painful 
preoccupation. Then the division was taken, and once more 
the Irish members refused to leave their places. The Speaker 
then called upon the different members in their turns to 
withdraw, and each in turn, and in practically identical 
language, refused to do so unless compelled by force, and: 
protested against the legality of the whole proceedings. But 
even in this somewhat monotonous proceeding there was 
room left for a variety of incident. Some of the members 
were content with being touched on the shoulder by the 
Sergeant-at-Arms ; while others, more obstinate, insisted on 
a show of considerable force. The most prominent among 
the latter was Mr. Metge, a young Protestant landlord like 
Mr. Parnell, who evidently shared his leader's intensity of 
political feeling. He stubbornly remained in his seat until 
Captain Gosset had called four of the attendants of the House 
to his aid. There was, naturally enough, a laugh when the 
Rev. Mr. Nelson, a gentleman with white hair and of seventy 



442 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

winters, confronted the Sergeant, who looked about the same 
age, and the spectacle of the one old gentleman attempting 
to resist the other was certainly somewhat ludicrous. Force, 
in the shape of the Sergeant, was a much more benign-looking 
individual, than meek submission as personified by the belli- 
gerent pastor. The appearance of the attendants who came 
into the House in Indian file to assist in the work of expul- 
sion was not impressive, being irresistibly suggestive of the 
depressed and perfunctory air of the theatrical ' super.' The 
protests of the expelled members varied slightly, and there 
was also a difference in the manner of their exit. Some 
hurried away, while others, following the example of Mr. 
Parnell, bowed with gravity and solemnity to the Chair. The 
demeanour of the House varied from moment to moment — 
sometimes it laughed, sometimes it cheered ; finally, it settled 
down into allowing the incident to pass off in grave silence. 
Another amusing incident that momentarily lit up the dolo- 
rous scene occurred when the Sergeant-at-Arms approached 
The O'Gorman Mahon. It was notorious that the two veterans 
had spent many a day of their hot youth together, and it was 
indeed a curious sight, the one aged man having to superintend 
the expulsion of the other. 

The absence of the Irish members allowed the Prime 
Minister to pass his new urgency rules without any difficulty, 
and thus, whatever indignities they had received were avenged 
by the sight of the oldest and formerly the freest assembly 
in the world absolutely surrendering the whole course of its 
proceedings into the hands of the Speaker. 

The debates dragged on, and the third reading of the 
Coercion Bill at last took place on February 25, 1881. At 
this stage Mr. Forster indulged in triumphant phrases that 
sound somewhat strangely at this time. As through the 
whole debate, he made the claim that he was acting for the 
interests and speaking the voice of the majority of the Irish 
people. 'We have,' he said, 'been delivering Ireland, or 
trying our best to deliver Ireland, from a great grievance, and 
we have been saving her, or believing we are saving her, from 
a still greater peril.' l And then he said, looking at the Irish 

1 Hansard, voi. cclviii. p. 1820. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 443 

members, and in final victory over their efforts to arrest 
Coercion : ' They have tried to prevent it, and they have failed.' 
Even some of the English papers thought this boastful 
harangue over the destruction of the liberties of Ireland a 
little too strong. ' We do not see much ground,' says the 
' Pall Mall Gazette,' ' for Mr. Forster's rather uncouth exulta- 
tion. It is true that the Irish members have failed to stop 
the Bill, but we do not know that it is a good reason why 
a Liberal minister should feel particularly triumphant be- 
cause he has passed a measure over the heads of all the 
Liberal representatives of the country concerned.' 

Almost immediately afterwards a second Coercion Bill, 
in the shape of the Arms Bill — Peace Preservation (Ireland) 
Bill — was proposed. This also was steadily resisted ; but 
the new rules of urgency were so stringently employed, that 
the day and the very hour at which certain stages of the Bill 
were to be concluded were passed by resolution of the 
House. Notwithstanding all this, it was March 1 1 when the 
third reading was carried. Again Mr. Forster took up the 
theme that he was acting in accordance with the wishes of the 
majority of the Irish people. ' He should not object,' he 
said. ... 'to appeal from hon. gentlemen opposite to the 
people of Ireland. . . . He was sure that he could venture 
to appeal with confidence from hon. members below the 
gangway opposite to their constituents.' T 

These sentences are quoted to illustrate the length to 
which Mr. Forster was prepared to go. While he was thus 
claiming to represent the majority of the Irish people, he 
must have known that he was laying up for himself stores 
of hatred in their hearts that no length of time will ever 
exhaust. While he claimed to represent the constituencies of 
his Irish opponents better than they did themselves, he must 
have seen that every member of the Irish party became more 
popular in exact proportion to the amount of resistance he 
offered to Mr. Forster's proposals. The quotations have 
an additional interest to-day as guides to the statesmanship 
of Mr. Forster. 

By this time exhaustion had completely set in on both 

1 Hansard, vol. cclix. p. 863. 



444 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

sides, and the House was more concerned at the time with 
the decision of one of his many law cases against Mr. Brad- 
laugh, and the report that the Government were going to ask 
urgency for Supply. There were three divisions — thin, heart- 
less, and shadowy things in a poorly attended House ; and the 
announcement that the Arms Bill had passed, and that thus the 
long, chequered, and passionate battle between coercion and 
obstruction was at an end, was received in an unbroken 
silence that was evidently intentional, and that marked a 
praiseworthy desire on all sides to escape from the bad and 
bitter passions of the struggle. 

Thus, after nine weeks, the great fight came to an end. 
The merits of the struggle can now be surveyed with the calm- 
ness of an historical retrospect. Many critics, then and since, 
have blamed the Irish party for the violence and the vehemence 
of their action, and for their prolongation of the struggle. It 
has been said that their attitude helped Mr. Forster more than 
his cooked statistics, and it was also said at the time that 
their expulsion wholesale, through their refusing to leave their 
seats, enabled Mr. Gladstone to carry the rules of urgency 
after a single night's debate. And it has been observed that, 
ever since Coercion, additional innovations have yearly been 
made upon the liberties of the House of Commons — which is 
another way of saying upon the liberties of the Irish members, 
for they alone have ever been, or probably ever will be, 
interfered with under penal Parliamentary orders. But if 
all these objections and a great many more were true, sub- 
sequent events have justified the wisdom of the tactics that 
were adopted. The nine weeks' Coercion struggle made 
the Irish party, and thereby gave unity, cohesion, and re- 
sistless strength to the great movement for the restoration 
of national rights. The first necessity at that period was 
to kindle into flames of enthusiasm the faith of the Irish 
people in themselves, in their representatives, and in the 
results that might be achieved by Parliamentary warfare. 
The struggle that was going on at the time, too, in Ireland 
for the possession of the land was one which required all the 
strength of revolutionary enthusiasm to carry it to anything 
like a successful issue. With all the mighty forces that were 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 445 

arrayed against the cause of the tenant, the tenant could win 
by determination and by passion alone. Every scene of violence 
in the House of Commons roused still higher the temper of 
the Irish people, and if that temper had not reached fever 
heat, the Land Bill of 1881 would have gone to the same 
bourne of rejected proposals as the Compensation for Disturb- 
ance Bill and the thousand and one other proposals for the 
reform of the land tenure in Ireland had gone before. The 
power, too, which the Coercion Act placed in the hands of 
Mr. Forster, and the use which Mr. Forster made of this 
power, must always be considered as among the greatest 
forces in bringing the Irish cause to its present position. 
At the moment when an Irish party is rapidly advancing to 
omnipotence in the affairs of the empire, Mr. Forster deserves 
to be remembered as perhaps best entitled to claim credit 
for its paternity. 

A word should be said as to the effect of this prolonged 
and unparalleled struggle upon the Irish party and upon the 
House generally. To the leading followers of Mr. Parnell it 
gave readiness, coolness, judgment, and others of the most 
useful Parliamentary qualities. When that struggle began the 
majority of them were the rawest of recruits, had the vague 
terror of a public assembly which is one of the chief diffi- 
culties of unpractised speakers, and had not wholly eman- 
cipated themselves from a slight awe of the House. But the 
nine weeks' fight destroyed all these obstacles to Parliamentary 
aplomb, and ever afterwards it was seen that none of Mr. 
Parnell's lieutenants was ever taken by surprise or ever un- 
equal to a Parliamentary emergency. And the House of 
Commons recognised and even submitted to this fact, hateful 
and detestable as it was. When the fight opened nothing 
was more common than to see attempts to put the Irish 
members down. There were shouts and laughter, desponding 
* Ahs ! ' and mocking ' Ohs ! ' but after a time all this was aban- 
doned, and whenever an Irish member arose there might 
be just one little groan, but then came silence and toleration. 
But while the Coercion struggle thus gave confidence and 
strength to the Irish members, it had the very opposite effect 
upon the English. The dulness, the lethargy, the stolid 



446 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

melancholy which fell upon the assembly when this fight 
was concluded was the subject of universal remark. It 
seemed to be almost impossible to collect a House, and even 
when the fight seemed fiercest on the Land Bill no enthu- 
siasm could apparently be pumped up. The House, in fact, 
seemed to have fallen into the abject despondency of 
premature age. To anybody who had been present in the 
earliest days of the Parliament of 1880 this contrast was 
indeed striking and melancholy. In those days the sight of 
the Liberal benches did any man good who believed in the 
blessings which wise legislation and earnest men can confer 
upon a community. The Ministerial seats were so crowded 
with the swelling majority that members had to flow over 
into all sorts of places of refuge, and Mr. Mitchell Henry on 
one occasion startled the House by asking a question from 
one of the side galleries, which at this period used always to 
be crowded. Then the look that was on the faces of these 
Liberals — so fresh, so exultant, so hopeful — they almost 
appeared already to weep, like Alexander, that- there were 
no new worlds of wrongs to redress, of evils to reform ! And 
just twelve months after this period of young and defiant 
hope the House was sick of itself, and had ceased to believe 
in its power to do good to anybody. Parliament had de- 
stroyed the liberties of Ireland, and Ireland had killed the 
vigour of Parliament. 

The Land Bill was introduced on April 7. The first 
impression produced upon the Irish members was one of 
pleased surprise. The vague indications given of the pro- 
visions of the Bill by Mr. Gladstone on the first night of the 
Session, and his obstinate refusal to say anything as to its 
contents on so many occasions afterwards, had led to the 
almost universal impression that the Bill would be of a 
tinkering character. It was soon seen that the proposals 
were bold and sweeping. The Easter recess came imme- 
diately after Mr. Gladstone's introduction of the measure, 
and accordingly there was no immediate opportunity of dis- 
cussing its details in Parliament. During the recess the Irish 
members proceeded to Dublin to consult with the country. 
A convention of the branches of the Land League was called, 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 447 

and was held in Dublin during two days. It very soon 
became evident that the two parties which existed in the 
Land League, as in every organisation, were inclined to take 
up different attitudes upon the Bill. The majority of the 
Parliamentary party were strongly in favour of accepting the 
Bill and of making it the starting-point of a new movement. 
Another section — resolute, bold, vehement — held as its funda- 
mental belief that the Land struggle should now be pushed 
on to the bitter end until it was closed for ever, and that it 
was in the power of the Irish people, by the maintenance of 
a determined and united front, to bring matters to that 
triumphant issue. The weapon which this section had in 
view, probably from the beginning, was a universal refusal to 
pay rent. The success which had attended a similar move- 
ment against the tithes was the precedent chiefly relied upon. 
It would be a waste of time to renew the controversy as to 
which of these two sections was justified in its policy. Suffice 
it to say that after some days' hesitation Mr. John Dillon 
was found among the more extreme party. To this section 
the Land Bill, as affording a compromise and a truce, was 
danger and not safety, and many of the objections brought 
against the measure certainly proved afterwards to be correct. 
The discussion occupied two days, and for some time the 
result seemed doubtful. Finally, a resolution was passed 
which left Irish members freedom either to oppose or support 
the second reading of the measure. 

This was the instruction from the National Convention 
with which Mr. Parnell and his colleagues returned to Parlia- 
ment ; but meantime events had been happening which had 
been doing a great deal to force the hands of the Irish leader. 
When the Coercion Act was passed, the state of Ireland was 
one of almost complete tranquillity. The improvement in its 
condition had been further helped by the character of the 
Land Bill. At the very moment when Mr. Forster was 
speaking with triumph of the passage of the third reading of 
the Coercion Bill, he had himself to acknowledge that Ireland 
was in a state of tranquillity. 

Since Parliament has been called together (he said, speaking in 
February) those outrages have diminished, and they are diminishing. 



448 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

They are still very great ; they are still far beyond the usual 
number. The month of January was worse than any month since 
1844, with the exception of the months of November and December 
last year. This month, although better, is still bad. And why are 
things getting better ? Because this House has determined to inter- 
fere, and has shown that it will make it difficult for these outrages 
to continue. 1 

But the Chief Secretary was soon to bring disturbance out 
of tranquillity, for he and the Irish officials throughout the 
country began to take steps which were calculated to drive 
even a less excited people into frenzy. 

He began to put the powers of the Coercion Act into 
operation ; and he displayed a sinister ingenuity in discover- 
ing the men who were least fitted to be entrusted with the large 
and arbitrary powers of such an Act. The most prominent 
of these officials were men who had already given abundant 
testimony of their unfitness for delicate duties and large 
authority. Major Bond had been dismissed from the police 
force of Birmingham ; Major Traill was an officer who had 
been publicly reprimanded by the Commander-in-Chief ; and 
his removal from his regiment had been requested by his 
commanding officer. 2 The character of Mr. Clifford Lloyd is 
now so notorious that it would be a waste of words to argue 
the gross blunder and even shameful outrage of sending such 
a man to administer a Coercion Act. Since his career in 
Ireland he has been tested in Egypt, and, as everybody 
knows, was found to be a person with whom no other col- 
league could work in harmony, and had to leave the country 
and his office. But before he was taken up as a special 
protege by Mr. Forster, he had already given indications of 
the kind of man he was. On January 1, 1 881, he bore down 
upon a meeting in Drogheda with a large body of police 
with fixed bayonets and dispersed the meeting forcibly ; 
and even after he had thus succeeded in accomplishing 
his purpose, shouted to the people : ' If you do not be off 
at once I will have you shot down.' 3 For his conduct on 

1 Hansard, vol. cclviii. p. 1S21. 

2 Mr. Forster, ib. pp. 1667-S. 

s Mr. Healy, ib. vol. cclxiii. p. 1255. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 449. 

this occasion he was denounced by Mr. Whitworth, brother 
of the then member for Drogheda, as a ' firebrand ' ; ' and 
the member for Drogheda himself — and no man was a more 
bitter opponent of the Irish party and the popular movement 
: — declared in a debate his great surprise that the Government 
had employed Mr. Lloyd. ' A more dangerous man,' said 
Mr. Whitworth, ' they could not send to the South of Ireland. 
His (Mr. Whitworth's) brother, who was a magistrate in 
Drogheda, told him that if this man were sent to disturbed 
districts, there would be bloodshed.' 2 

Major Bond, in spite of his antecedents, seems to have 
conducted himself with more discretion than might have 
been anticipated ; but Major Traill and Mr. Clifford Lloyd 
raged through the population with a perfect frenzy for insult, 
lawlessness, and cruelty. One of Major Traill's exploits was 
to go to a police barrack on a Sunday, where some men were 
in custody, to hold a court there and then, with himself as 
sole magistrate, and to impose on the men sentences varying 
from eight days to one month with hard labour. Of course, 
when the case was brought before the Superior Courts, the 
action of Major Traill was overruled. Baron Fitzgerald, the 
presiding judge — a strong Conservative — declared ' that he 
(Major Traill) had sentenced three several men to imprison- 
ment illegally ; ' and the defence made by Major Traill's coun- 
sel was, that, being only a Major in the army, ' he could not be 
expected to know the law accurately, as he was not a lawyer.' 
But meantime, the persons who had thus been illegally con- 
victed had served the whole term of their imprisonment, and 
had taken their sleep upon plank beds. Mr. Forster thought, 
when the matter was brought before him, that Major Traill 
' had been sufficiently penalised for the error he made, by 
becoming the defendant in three actions.' 3 

But the exploits of Mr. Clifford Lloyd in Kilmallock and 
the other places to which he was sent leave in the shade 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxiii. p. 639. Mr. Clifford Lloyd wrote to the papers after- 
wards to deny that he ever used this expression ; but Mr. Healy and several 
Catholic clergymen who were present declared that they heard it. In nearly all 
such cases in which Mr. Clifford Lloyd was arraigned, he gave a version different 
from that of the persons who made the complaint. 

2 lb. vol. cclxi. pp. 99S-9. 3 lb. pp. 11 12. 



450 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

everything aone by his colleagues. On the first day on which 
he made his appearance in the town of Kilmallock, he 
ordered the people who were talking in groups around the 
town to disperse to their homes, and when they did not 
immediately obey, struck them furiously with his cane. 
Shortly afterwards a band, which was playing as it passed 
through the streets, was attacked by the police under the 
direction of Mr. Lloyd, and the people were clubbed with the 
ends of the rifles. 1 Mr. Lloyd next attacked the women of 
Kilmallock. One evening a number of young ladies were 
standing in the street. The police ordered them to disperse 
on the ground that they were obstructing the highway, a charge 
of strange absurdity in the ghastly loneliness of a small Irish 
town. They were brought up before Mr. Lloyd and several 
other magistrates, and the police constable who acted under Mr. 
Lloyd's orders accused the ladies of using insulting language, as 
well as of obstructing the highway. When the constable was 
examined, his complaint was found to be that he had been 
called ' Clifford Lloyd's pet.' Both the charge and the police 
constable, as well as Mr. Clifford Lloyd, were laughed at, 
and the young ladies had to be discharged. Mr. Lloyd was 
more successful in his operations under the Coercion Act. 
He had inflicted fines upon two men and a married woman, 
and public sympathy went so strongly with these people that 
a subscription was raised to pay the fine, rather than allow 
them to go to prison. Andrew Mortel and Edmund O'Neill 
were the two men who carried around the subscription list. 
They were arrested and placed in prison under the Coer- 
cion Act on the ground of intimidation. Mr. O'Sullivan, 
then member for the County of Limerick and a resident 
in Kilmallock, got a declaration from all the persons 
who gave subscriptions that they had given the money 
voluntarily. Mr. Mortel and Mr. O'Neill, however, remained 
in prison. 2 

Finally Mr. Lloyd obtained the arrest of Father Sheehy, and 
this arrest of a priest, eminent for his abilities and for his cha- 
racter, and with a strong hold upon the affections of the masses 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxi. p. 994. Letter of Father Sheehy to Mr. Parnell. 

2 lb. vol. cclxiii. pp. iooo-i. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 451 

by his fearless spirit, added enormously to the exasperation 
of the country. It will be seen by-and-by that though at 
this period Mr. Lloyd had not succeeded in his crusade against 
women, he was more successful when the regime of Coercion 
was entirely unchecked, and Mr. Forster set himself without 
shame or scruple to the dragooning of Ireland. 

And these offences were aggravated by the fact that every 
single act of police tyranny, petty or large, found a staunch ad- 
vocate in the House of Commons in Mr. Forster. The landlords 
at the same time, too, proceeded to justify the worst anticipa- 
tions of the Land Leaguers. It had been over and over again 
pointed out that the effect of the Coercion Act, coming as it did 
on the threshold of the Land Bill, would be to inspire the land- 
lords with the idea that the tenants, once more terrorised and 
broken, could be treated with the cruelty of the old times. 
Large numbers of the tenants had not yet recovered from the 
reeling shock of 1879, had not paid their rent, and could not 
pay it ; and even in the Land Bill that was coming there 
was no provision for them. The result was that evictions, 
which had been brought down when the Land League was 
completely triumphant, now made a sudden bound upwards. 

In the quarter of 1880 ending March 31, 2,748 persons 
had been evicted ; in the second quarter, ending June 30, 
3,508 persons ; in the third quarter, ending September 30, 
3,447 persons ; and in the fourth quarter, ending December 31, 
when the strong arm of the Land League stood between the 
landlord and the tenant, the number of persons evicted had 
fallen to 954. 1 The first quarter of 1881 showed the effect 
upon landlords of the promise of Coercion, and the number 
of persons evicted rose to 1,732. When the Coercion Act 
began to be applied, and the various local defenders of the 
tenants began to be imprisoned by the Clifford Lloyds and 
the Traills, the evictions gave a sudden rise from 1,732 to 
5,262. 

So strongly was public opinion, even in Parliament, im- 
pressed with these facts that Mr. Labouchere proposed a 

1 A considerable number of those persons were afterwards admitted as care- 
takers, but as everybody knows this deprived them of their status as tenants, and 
left them at the mercy of the landlords. 



452 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

clause in the Coercion Act suspending evictions ; but, of course, 
it was rejected. Mr. Forster himself, lapsing into, or affect- 
ing a moment of sympathy with the oppressed, as in the 
session of 1880, when he declared that he would resign rather 
than carry out cruel evictions, confessed that many of the 
persons about to be evicted were unable to pay their rents. 
At the same time he stated that many who were able to 
pay their rents were ordered by the Land League leaders to 
withhold them. Mr. Parnell at once accepted the implied sug- 
gestion, and for two hours the question was discussed in 
Parliament whether the Government would refuse to lend the 
aid of military and police in throwing out the distressed on 
the roadside if the Land League leaders would respond by 
advising the payment of rent in cases where it could be paid. 
But the proposed compromise came to nothing. Evictions, 
accordingly, proceeded apace ; and the suffering of eviction 
was aggravated by the gradually increasing severity of the 
police regime. Finally matters reached a climax when the 
city of Dublin was proclaimed under the new Act, although 
up to this time not a single political crime had been committed 
by any one of its three hundred thousand inhabitants. Mr. 
Forster had to confess that the sole object of proclaiming the 
city was to bring the meetings of the Land League held there 
within the provisions of the Coercion Act. A short time 
afterwards Mr. John Dillon was arrested, and so the work of 
driving the country into madness went on. 

The first effect was upon the Parliamentary party. The 
arrest of Mr. Dillon was announced immediately before the 
second reading of the Land Bill. The Irish party were called 
together to decide upon their plan of action. Again in the 
conference-room thirty of them met under the presidency of 
Mr. Parnell. A discussion, the full gravity of which was felt 
by all, occupied the party during three hours. Mr. Parnell 
himself proposed from the chair a resolution in favour of ab- 
stention, and this resolution was carried by 17 votes against 12. 

This decision produced a feeling of dismay in many sec- 
tions in Ireland, was bitterly criticised, and was openly dis- 
obeyed by some members of the party. In fact, it may now 
be admitted that this was one of the very darkest hours 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 453 

through which the Irish party had passed ; yet there will be 
few to deny now that the decision to abstain was the only 
expedient and consistent course which the Irish party could 
have adopted. That course left the party complete freedom 
of action in the future ; it expressed in the most emphatic 
manner the conviction that the Land Bill was not the final 
settlement of the land question ; and, above all, it helped the 
chances of the measure with the House of Lords by raising 
in the background the spectre of a ' No-Rent ' manifesto. 

This will appear more clearly by-and-by. For the pre- 
sent it will suffice to say here that the Land Bill was objected 
to on the following grounds : First, that it would establish 
an impracticable and inconvenient state of relations between 
landlord and tenant by endeavouring to fix a partnership in 
the soil between two persons of opposing interests, and that 
the only solution which would be just, complete, and final 
would be the solution proposed by the Land League — the 
transformation of rent-paying tenants into peasant proprie 
tors ; secondly, that the land courts would not make such 
reductions in the rents as were required by the circumstances 
of the case ; thirdly, that, as a large number of tenants were, 
owing to bad seasons and by the legacy of the ' hanging gale ' 
and other arrears from the period of the great famine, entirely 
unable to pay their rent, the new legislation could do them 
no good, and that they would be just as much at the mercy 
of the landlords as if no legislation at all were passed ; 
fourthly, that the leaseholders were excluded ; fifthly, that 
due provision was not made for saving the improvements 
effected by the tenant from confiscation in the shape of rent ; 
sixthly, the clause in favour of emigration ; and seventhly, 
the absence of provision for the labourers. 

These objections were met in the same spirit as the ob- 
jections made by the Irish Parliamentary party to the Land 
Bill of 1870 ; and subsequent events have, in the case of the 
Bill of 1 88 1 as in that of 1870, proved the unwisdom of 
English statesmen and the wisdom of the Irish representa- 
tives. There is not one of these objections which has not 
been proved sound, and most of them will reappear shortly 
when they pass from the mouths of Irish representatives into 



454 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

measures passed by both Houses of Parliament. The Irish 
members endeavoured in vain, in the course of the proceed- 
ings in Parliament, to introduce amendments which would have 
the effect of making the Bill a better settlement ; but these 
amendments were almost invariably rejected. One amend- 
ment, however, was carried which was destined to play a 
most important part in the entire future of the land question. 

Mr. Healy stuck to his place throughout the discussion of 
the Bill, and the debates were often wholly carried on by 
him, Mr. Law, and Mr. Gibson. The present writer was sit- 
ting next to Mr. Healy on the night when the famous Healy 
clause, declaring that in future no rent should be chargeable on 
the tenants' improvements, was carried. Mr. Healy made his 
proposal in mild and almost careless terms, and Mr. Law got 
up and accepted the principle with scarcely the appearance 
even of demur. But there was a little confusion about the 
exact wording, and, in order to give time for collecting thought, 
Dr. Playfair remembered that he wanted his tea, and adjourned 
the House for a quarter of an hour. The clause was drafted 
meantime, and was added to the Bill. Apparently nothing very 
particular had occurred, the whole business had passed off in 
unbroken tranquillity and overflowing amicability ; but the 
prime mover in the business knew well what he had done. 
With a face of sphinx-like severity Mr. Healy whispered to 
the friend by his side : ' These words will put millions in the 
pockets of the tenants.' 

The Land Bill received the royal assent on August 22. 
The Irish leaders were now face to face with the gravest pro- 
blem they had yet to encounter. This was in regard to the 
attitude they should assume towards the new Act. There 
were many things in the state of Ireland at that period to 
tempt to extreme resolves. The Land League had gone on 
daily increasing in power ; Coercion, instead of diminishing, 
seemed to add to its influence and its prestige. Though 
Parliament was engaged in the passage of a measure in many 
respects as stupendous as the Land Act of 1881, the centre 
of political gravity and political interest was in the operations 
of the Land League in Ireland rather than in the debates 
and proceedings at St. Stephen's. The Irish farmer could 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 455 

not be blamed if he observed with exultation the absolutely 
revolutionary change which had come over his prospects. In 
this hour he recalled with bitter satisfaction that long list of 
modest proposals for his relief which the Imperial Parliament 
had ever rejected, and the gloom, unbroken by one word of 
sympathy or one statesmanlike proposal, from the passage 
of the Union till the Land Bill of 1870. The reader has 
had set forth in previous pages the history of all these futile 
appeals to the Legislature for relief, and also a picture of the 
awful evils for which relief was sought. He will not have 
forgotten the dread regime of famine and fever, the whole- 
sale clearances, the merciless rack-renting, the tyranny omni- 
potent, mean, and ubiquitous, the wholesale emigration, which 
formed the one side of the picture, and the ignorance, the 
insolence, the light-hearted neglect, or the mocking insult of 
English Ministers and Parliaments, which formed the other 
side of the picture ; and is the hope vain that, whatever be 
his nationality, he will feel some sympathy with the reversal 
of the two parts at this moment : the Legislature eager with 
gifts, the farmer turning away in the scorn of self-dependence ? 
In any case, the Irish farmers understood the change. They 
saw that the success of a bill proposing changes against which 
all the statesmen, the whole press, and the entire landlord party 
of England and Ireland would have risen in revolt a few years 
before, was longed for with far greater eagerness by their here- 
ditary and hitherto omnipotent oppressors than it was by them- 
selves. In short, the slave had become the master ; the suppliant 
was transformed into the victor dictating terms. It was no 
wonder that the peasant should bless the men and the 
organisation by whom a transformation so glorious and so 
complete had been worked in his terrible lot. On the other 
hand, Mr. Parnell had placed before himself, as a central point 
of policy, by no word or act of his to abate one jot of 
the victory which the people might be able to wring from 
their enemies. As has been already said, he is, in political 
matters above all other things, a man who drives the very 
hardest bargain that circumstances will permit. This is an 
outcome of a mind which has a perfectly clear idea of what it 
wants, a full sense of its own rights, and a grip, consequently, 



456 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

that never loosens. And, again, it is well to recall the moral 
which every politician of thought has drawn from the two 
most disastrous pages of O'Connell's history — the surrender 
of democratic political forces by his consent to the abolition 
of the forty-shilling freeholders, and his consent, after the 
great sacrifices and complete victory of the anti-tithe cam- 
paign, to allow these vile imposts to be reimposed under the 
new name of an addition to the rack-rent. 

At this moment the situation, as it presented itself to Mr. 
Parnell's mind, was this : the land courts had practically the 
entire settlement of the rental of Ireland in their hands ; the 
changes required in that rental, according to the views of Mr. 
Parnell, were not small, nor narrow, nor sporadic, but revo- 
lutionary, wholesale, and thorough. I will not now attempt 
to argue at any length the question whether this was or was 
not a correct view of the change required in Irish rents. To 
an Irishman I have only to present the question in this 
fashion — What is the margin between the present position of 
the Irish farmer in regard to clothes, to housing, to food, and 
in resources generally, and that of the farmer in other 
civilised countries ? Every thoughtful Irish reader will 
agree that the difference is not a chink, but a chasm. The 
disproportion that exists between the position of the tenant, 
as it is and as it should be, represents the disproportion in 
the rent as it was and as it should be ; and therefore the 
changes in the rent should be sweeping and revolutionary, 
not small and halting. To the English reader I have only 
to point to the almost universal reduction of rents which 
the landlords of England have voluntarily made during the 
last three or four years, to that depression of agriculture 
which has passed from the region of controversy to that of 
admitted fact, and, above all, to the thousands of acres lying 
unoccupied and untilled, as proof that in England rents must 
be subjected to revolutionary reduction ; and if this be true 
of England, with its splendid markets, its large manufacturing 
industries, its unsurpassed railway communication, a fortiori 
it is true of a country like Ireland — poor, with no large towns, 
without any manufactures, and with communication still 
most imperfectly developed. 



, THE COERCION STRUGGLE 457 

But what were the chances of a revolutionary reduction 
of rents ? The whole character of the land court forbade 
any such expectation. Judge O'Hagan, the chief of the court, 
was well known to be a man of pliant and timid character. Of 
his two colleagues, Mr. Litton was a lawyer who had never got 
beyond the peddling proposals of Ulster tenant leagues, and 
a man utterly devoid of any boldness or initiative ; while Mr. 
Vernon, the third member of the commission, was agent for 
several large landed proprietors, was himself a landed proprie- 
tor, and had besides the reputation of being much stronger 
willed than either of his colleagues. Apart from their own weak- 
ness of character, the two legal members of the chief commission 
were men who had grown old in all the ideas and traditions of 
the ancient laws with regard to the tenure of land in Ireland. 
The whole bent of these laws was towards the rights of the 
landlords. The recognition of the right of the tenant, in 
fact, marked nothing less than a new birth in political and 
legal ideas. To a generation that has lived to see the Land 
Acts of 1870 and 1881, the theory of a proprietary right by 
the tenant in the land may appear an axiomatic truth, to 
which law gave simply the stamp of traditional common 
sense. To the generation to which the youth of Mr. Justice 
O'Hagan and Mr. Litton belonged, the proprietorship of the 
tenant in the soil was the code only of the Ribbon Lodge, 
and had its only statutable sanction in the blunderbuss. 

Again, when Mr Parnell and the other leaders of the Land 
League sought for the probable effects of the rent-fixing 
clauses of the Land Act, they naturally turned to the prophe- 
cies of the men by whom the Land Act had been framed 
and had been carried through both Houses of Parliament 

Mr. Gladstone had declared, as has been seen, at the very 
start of the Session, that the rents of Ireland on the whole, 
were fair ; and in proposing the first reading of the Land 
Bill, he had made the more emphatic declaration that in the 
Bessborough Commission of Inquiry the landlords had been 
tested and had stood the test. 1 In the House of Lords — 
where the Land Bill had to be gilded with even more attrac- 
tive coating — the declarations had been still more encouraging 
to the landlords. 

1 Hansard, vol. cclx. p. 892. 



458 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

If (said Lord Selborne) you compare the state of things under the 
Bill with that which would exist if nothing of the kind were done, the 
Bill may be expected to restore, and moreover not diminish, the 
value of the landlords' property. 1 

I deny (he said again) that it will diminish, in any degree 
whatever, the rights of the landlord or the value of the interest he 
possesses. 2 

Lord Carlingford was still more explicit : — 

My lords (he said), I maintain that the provisions of this Bill will 
cause the landlords no money loss whatever. 3 

These prophecies have frequently been thrown in the 
faces of the Liberal leaders by Lord Salisbury, and effective 
contrast has been drawn between them and the actual results 
of the establishment of the land courts. But this was the 
wisdom that came after the event. Lord Salisbury was 
justified in declaring that it was prophecies like these which 
induced the House of Lords to pass the Land Bill. It is 
probable that these gentlemen, when they made these state- 
ments, were perfectly sincere. Mr. Parnell and his colleagues 
were certainly bound to take them as being sincere, and 
their prophecies as to the results of their own legislation were 
that the reduction of rents in Ireland would be infinitesimal, 
while the conviction of the Irish leaders was that the reduction 
should be revolutionary. Furthermore, every care had been 
taken that the decisions of the land courts should be subject 
to Parliamentary criticism. The courts were bound to present 
to Parliament almost every detail of every single one of the 
cases brought before them. A considerable number of the 
sub-commissioners held but temporary appointments, and, as 
a matter of fact, some were removed under a continual hailstorm 
of Parliamentary criticism ; and the Parliamentary criticism 
that they had to dread was not that of the small minority 
who defended the interests of the tenant in Parliament, but 
that of the overwhelming majority of the two parties in both 
Houses of the Legislature — the majority which represented 
the interests of the landlords. 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxiv. p. 534. 5 lb. p. 532. 

3 lb. p. 252. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 459 

Here, then, was the situation. A nation requiring whole- 
sale reform, and the instruments wherewith to carry out that 
reform a body of men, weak, timid, and for the most part 
removable, and nearly all the legislative forces of the country 
impelling the court towards minimising the rig^hts of the 
tenant and exaggerating those of the landlord. Under such 
circumstances but one decision was possible — to oppose to all 
these mighty forces some resistance that might hope to be as 
effective. If the land court were subject to the pressure of 
the landlords of the House of Commons and of the House of 
Lords, and bound by the declarations of the Ministers on the 
one side, it was necessary to procure counterbalancing pressure 
on the side of the tenants ; in other words, to make the court 
fair to the tenants by making the tenants to some extent 
independent of the court. These were the steps of reasoning 
by which the Irish leaders arrived at the conviction that by 
organisation and unity alone could the farmer maintain the 
ground he had gained ; that without this organisation and 
unity the land courts would become but a new machinery for 
perpetuating the yoke of impossible rents, and the Land Act 
turn out, like so many other previous statutes, but Dead-sea 
fruit that turned to ashes at the touch. 

At the same time there were the land courts with their 
doors open. The extreme section of the Land Leaguers were 
so convinced of the omnipotence of the League, and of the 
futility and treachery of the Land Act, that they strongly 
urged the policy of keeping the tenants out of the courts 
altogether. But it was perceived by Mr. Parnell that such a 
policy was impracticable. The fact was bound to be faced 
that, whatever was said or done, a large number of the tenants 
would try their chances in the land courts ; and, therefore, 
the policy of Mr. Parnell was not to prevent, but to regulate 
the appeal to these courts. To him the best plan of doing 
this appeared to be to place in the courts a certain number 
of typical cases. The cases were not to be those which 
exhibited the most flagrant instances of rack-renting. This 
proviso in the selection of cases was that which afterwards 
most deeply moved the wrath of Mr. Gladstone, and was 
denounced by him in that passionate rhetoric which he has 



460 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

always been able to command when dealing with his poli- 
tical opponents. But the justice of the proviso requires very 
little defence. The conviction of Mr. Parnell and of every- 
body in Ireland was, that the scale of rent was too high 
generally and not sporadically ; that the scale, therefore, 
required almost universal reduction. Obviously an extrava- 
gantly rack-rented property would not supply to the court a 
fair and average case. A large reduction might be made in 
such a case, and at the same time the general scale of rent in 
Ireland might remain too high. There was the danger of the 
tenants being deceived, by the reduction in such a case, into 
a false estimate of what the general attitude of the land courts 
would be. A reduction of fifty per cent, on a hopelessly rack- 
rented estate might well dazzle the farmers into the belief 
that a reduction of fifty per cent, would be made all round. 
They would, of course, have discovered their mistake in time, 
but they would not have discovered it until, by their appeal 
to the land court, they had disintegrated the organisation 
which ought still to remain their main safeguard and buttress. 
In this way what was known as the ' Test-Case ' policy came 
to be adopted. 

A second great convention was held in the Rotunda on 
September 15 and the two following days. It was one of the 
most imposing meetings that had ever assembled in Ireland. 
Upwards of a thousand branches were represented, the tone of 
the speeches was triumphant, and the whole assembly breathed 
a spirit of exultation. The members of the extreme section 
formed no inconsiderable portion of the delegates. To this 
section enormous strength had been added by the use to which 
Mr. Forster had put his Coercion Acts. By this time a large 
number of the men who had been most active in building up the 
mighty organisation were in gaol. From their cells these men 
appealed to their colleagues not to give up the fruits of the 
victory for which they had consented to brave and to suffer, 
and the advocates of extreme courses found the most telling 
argument in favour of their policy in the sufferings of Mr. 
Davitt and Father Sheehy. The proposal of this section 
was, that the tenantry should have nothing whatever to do 
with the Act ; that they should continue the organisation and 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 461 

the agitation, and go on to the bitter end, until landlordism 
was completely crushed, and the Government could have no 
choice but to accept the programme of the Land League and 
purchase peace by the expropriation of the landlords and the 
creation of a peasant proprietary. The weapon which this 
section held to be the means of bringing about this final con- 
summation was a ' No-Rent ' manifesto ; but to this course 
Mr. Parnell and the greater number of his colleagues were at 
this moment opposed. They were in favour of the middle 
course which I have described. They thought it possible at 
the same time to maintain the organisation and to test the 
land court. Their policy was well summed up by Mr. Parnell 
himself, as that of ' testing and not using the Land Act.' 
The influence of Mr. Parnell and his colleagues prevailed, 
and the ' Test-Case ' policy was sanctioned by the con- 
vention. 

It was often suggested, immediately afterwards, that this 
policy was never really believed in by Mr. Parnell. I can bear 
personal testimony to the fact that he proceeded at once to 
take the means necessary for carrying the policy into prac- 
tical effect. I sat by his side for nights in succession, as he 
extracted from the books of the Land League cases which 
appeared to him to be such as would fairly test the disposi- 
tion of the court, and Mr. Healy went down to the South 
of Ireland to visit the homes and to investigate the farms of 
some whose cases had thus been selected. On the day on 
which the forms for application to the new land court were 
issued, Mr. Parnell was so eager to be among the first appli- 
cants that he visited the house of the Land Commission no 
less than three times. In fact, he had resolved to give the 
fair ' Test-Case ' policy a bond-fide trial. 

But this was not to be. The Ministry, having passed the 
Land Act, found that their political credit required the Act to 
appear successful. If after all the time they had consumed in 
Parliament, all the prophecies they had uttered, all the pressure 
they had exercised on their unwilling supporters to have the 
Bill swallowed, it turned out a failure ; if it were proved to 
be, after all the pains spent upon it, not the great and magni- 
ficent creation of a Minister of genius but a rickety child 



462 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

dead almost as soon as born, then came chaos and political 
bankruptcy. Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues resolved to 
act with the reckless unscrupulousness of men confronted by 
irretrievable ruin. If the Land Act were not a final settlement 
of the question, at least it should appear to be so ; if Ireland 
were not tranquil, at least she should be made to seem tranquil ; 
if disaffection could not be destroyed, at least the sound of its 
voice could be stifled. 

Mr. Gladstone spoke at Leeds on October 7. In his 
speech he made a violent and evidently premeditated attack 
on the Irish Leader. Mr. Parnell and his followers were spoken 
of as ' a handful of men, and nothing but a handful of men, in 
Parliament whom I will not call a party, for they are not 
entitled to it.' ' A contrast was drawn between the action of 
Mr. Parnell and Mr. Dillon, full of compliment to Mr. Dillon. 
(Mr. Dillon, by the way, replied a few days afterwards show- 
ing how utterly the Prime Minister had misrepresented his 
attitude, and repudiated the compliments paid to him at 
the expense of his leader.) Then Mr. Parnell was described 
in an attitude the grotesqueness of which even sophistry 
and political necessities might recoil from. As I have 
shown, the object of the Irish leader was to save the tenants 
from the chicanery and spoliation of the courts ; and the 
impression Mr. Gladstone sought to convey, and probably 
did convey, was that Mr. Parnell's object was to deprive the 
Irish farmers of the benefit of the Land Act. ' Now,' said 
Mr. Gladstone, ' that the Land Act is passed, and now that he 
is afraid lest the people of England should win the hearts of 
the whole of the Irish nation, he has a new and enlarged 
gospel of plunder to proclaim.' 

It was part of the case of Mr. Gladstone that Mr. Parnell 
and the people were entirely at issue. Mr. Parnell was not a 
beloved leader of the people, but a detested tyrant. 

The people of Ireland, we believe (said Mr. Gladstone), desire, in 
conformity with the advice of the old patriots, and their bishops and 
their best friends .... to make a full trial of the Land Act; and if 
they do make a full trial of that Act, you may rely upon it, it is as 
certain as human contingencies can be to give peace to the country. 
1 Freeman's Journal, October 10, 1881. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 463 

We shall rely on the good sense of the people, because we are de- 
termined that no force, or fear of ruin through force, shall as far as 
we are concerned, and as it is in our power to decide the question, 
prevent the Irish people having the full and free benefit of the Land 
Act 1 

Mr. Gladstone's interpretation of ' relying on the good 
sense of the people ' took, as will presently be seen, a comic 
form a few days afterwards. Then the ' Test- Case ' policy was 
denounced in the most violent language, and finally came this 
ominous passage : — 

When we have that short, further experience to which I have re- 
ferred, if it should then appear that there is still to be fought a final 
conflict in Ireland between law on the one side and sheer lawlessness 
on the other — if the law, still purged from defects, is still to be re- 
jected and refused, the first condition of political society remains 
unfulfilled, and then, I say without hesitation, the resources of civili- 
sation against its enemies are not yet exhausted. 2 

To that speech on Sunday, October 9, Mr. Parnell replied 
at Wexford. 

The reception given to Mr. Parnell at this Wexford meet- 
ing is described by those who saw it as perhaps the most 
enthusiastic of the many receptions of almost frenzied enthu- 
siasm which he received during this momentous year. The 
man denounced by Mr. Gladstone as a tyrant, issuing man- 
dates to trembling slaves, was received with expressions of 
love that might have made the heart of even an emperor 
beat fast. Triumphal arches spanned the streets, evergreens 
and flowers covered the windows and doorways and lamp posts. 
Bands came from several parts of the country, and special 
trains brought thousands from the surrounding districts. The 
speech of Mr. Parnell was in the same passionate tones as 
that to which it was a reply. Mr. Gladstone, in the course of 
his speech, had complained of the want of all support to the 
efforts of Government by the landlords and other classes 
threatened, and then had dropped into the astonishing con- 
fession that ' Government is expected to keep the peace with 
no moral force behind them.' 

1 Freemaifs Journal, October 10, iSSr. 2 lb. . 



464 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The Government (said Mr. Parnell, taking up this point) has no 
moral force behind it in Ireland. The whole Irish people are against 
them. They have to depend for their support upon the interest of a 
very small minority of the people of this country, and, therefore, they 
have no moral force behind them, and Mr. Gladstone, in these few 
short words, admits that English government has failed in Ireland 
. . . and he wound up with a threat — this man who has no moral 
force behind him — he wound up with a threat, ' No fear of force shall 
so far as we are concerned, and as it is in our power ' — I say it is not 
ki his power to trample on the aspirations and the rights of the Irish 
nation with no moral force behind him. These are very brave 
words that he uses, but it strikes me they have a ring about them 
like the whistle of a schoolboy on his way through a churchyard at 
night to keep up his courage. ... I trust, as the result of this great 
movement, that just as Gladstone, by the Act of 1881, has eaten 
all his old words, has departed from all his formerly declared prin- 
ciples, now we shall see that these brave words of this English 
Prime Minister will be scattered as chaff before the united and 
advancing determination of the Irish people, to regain for themselves 
their lost land and their lost legislative independence. 

On the Monday following his speech, Mr. Parnell was 
entertained at a banquet, and in his speech he used some 
words which showed he had some presentiment of what was 
coming. 

I am frequently disposed to think (he said) that Ireland has not 
yet got through the troubled waters of affliction to be crossed before 
we reach the promised land of prosperity to Ireland. . . . There may 
be, probably there will be, more stringent Coercion before us than we 
have yet experienced. 

The next day he went to his home in Avondale, and he 
reached Dublin by the last train on Wednesday night, having 
promised to attend the Kildare County Convention, which 
was to beheld at Naas on the following day. He was to have 
left Kingsbridge Station by the 10.15 A.M. train. On that 
same Wednesday a Cabinet Council had been held in Eng- 
land, and in the evening Mr. Forster had crossed over, author- 
ised to arrest his chief opponent. Here is Mr. Parnell's own 
account of what actually occurred : — 

Intending to proceed to Naas this morning, I ordered, before 
retiring to bed on Wednesday night, that I should be called at half- 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 465 

past eight o'clock. When the man came to my bedroom to awaken 
me, he told me that two gentlemen were waiting below who wanted 
to see me. I told him to ask their names and business. Having 
gone out, he came back in a few moments, and said that one was the 
superintendent of police and the other was a policeman. I told him 
to say that I would be dressed in half an hour, and would see them 
then. He went away, but came back again to tell me that he had 
been downstairs to see the gentlemen, and had told them I was not 
stopping at that hotel. He then said that I should get out through the 
back part of the house, and not allow them to catch me. I told him 
that I would not do that, even if it were possible, because the police 
authorities would be sure to have everyway most closely watched. 
He again went down, and this time showed the detectives up to my 
bedroom. 

The ' Freeman's Journal,' * from which this is quoted, con- 
tinues : — 

In Foster Place there was a force of one hundred policemen held 
in readiness in case of any emergency. Mr. Mallon, when he entered 
the bedroom, found Mr. C. S. Parnell in the act of dressing, and 
immediately presented him with two warrants. He did not state 
their purport, but Mr. Parnell understood the situation without any 
intimation. It is not true to state that he exhibited surprise or that 
he looked puzzled. The documents were presented to him with 
gentlemanly courtesy by Mr. Mallon, and the hon. gentleman who 
was about to be arrested received them with perfect calmness and 
deliberation. He had had private advices from England regarding 
the Cabinet Council, and was well aware that the Government 
meditated some coup d'etat. 

Two copies of the warrants had also been sent to the Kingsbridge 
Terminus, to be served on Mr. Parnell in case he should go to 
Sallins by an early train. Superintendent Mallon expressed some 
anxiety lest a crowd should collect and interfere with the arrest, and 
he requested Mr. Parnell to come away as quickly as possiMe. Mr. 
Parnell responded to his anxiety. A cab was called, and the two 
detectives with the honourable prisoner drove away. When the 
party reached the Bank of Ireland, at which but a fortnight previously 
Mr. Parnell had directed the attention of many thousands to its 
former memories and future prospects, five or six metropolitan police, 
evidently by preconcerted arrangement, jumped upon two outside 
cars and drove in front of the party. On reaching the quays at 
the foot of Parliament Street, a number of horse police joined the 
1 October 14, 1881. 



466 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

procession at the rear. In this order the four vehicles drove to Kil- 
mainham. This strange procession passed along the thoroughfares 
without creating any remarkable notice. A few people did stop to 
look at it on part of the route, and then pursued the vehicles. But 
their curiosity was probably aroused by the presence of ' the force ' 
rather than by any knowledge that after a short lull the Coercion Act 
was again being applied to the elite of the League. They stopped 
their chase after going a few perches, and at half-past nine o'clock 
Mr. Parnell appeared in front of the dark portals of Kilmainham. 

A few hours afterwards he was interviewed by a reporter 
of the ' Freeman's Journal.' The interview closed with one 
of those mots by which Mr. Parnell has marked important 
epochs in his career. ' As I rose to leave,' says the reporter, 
Mr. Parnell stated, ' I shall take it as an evidence that the 
people did not do their duty if I am speedily released.' 

It was on the morning of Thursday, October 13, that Mr. 
Parnell was arrested ; on this same day the Prime Minister 
was otherwise employed. It was the day fixed for presenting 
him with the freedom of the city at the Guildhall. The formal 
announcement of the arrest of Mr. Parnell was, says the Lon- 
don correspondent of the ' Freeman's Journal,' l ' accompanied 
by a good deal of theatrical display, which would have been 
less expected from the present Prime Minister than at the 
initiation of the late Lord Beaconsfield.' 

Before Mr. Gladstone (continues the writer) had been presented 
with the address, everyone in the room had been made aware of the 
contents of a telegram dealing with Mr. Parnell's arrival at Kilmain- 
ham ; but before the right hon. member rose to reply a messenger 
most consequentially advanced and presented him with the Treasury 
despatch formally stating the fact. The Premier must have given 
official sanction to the arrest eighteen hours previously, and could 
very well have made his speech without such stage-like surroundings. 

Mr. Gladstone, after a few platitudes in reply to the address 
of the Corporation, went on to use these words : — 

Within these few moments I have been informed that towards the 
vindication of the law, of order, of the rights of property, of the 
freedom of the land, of the first elements of political life and civilisa- 
tion, the first step has been taken in the arrest of the man 

1 October 14, iSSl. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 467 

but Mr. Gladstone was not allowed immediately to conclude 
the sentence, for, as the report says : — 

At this moment the whole of the vast audience rose to their feet, 
and stood wildly cheering for several minutes. 

When at last he could resume, Mr. Gladstone thus finished 
the sentence : — 

who has made himself beyond all others prominent in the attempt 

to destroy the authority of the law and to substitute what would end 
in being nothing more nor less than anarchical oppression exercised 
upon the people of Ireland. 

It is well to take note of some phenomena which followed 
this arrest. It will show how extremely well the two nations 
have been made to understand each other by the legislative 
bond that has united them for eighty-five years. In England 
and in Ireland the arrest was received with feeling's as dia- 
metrically opposed, and as bitterly hostile, as can possibly 
exist between two nations. 

The loud and prolonged cheering (said the ' Pall Mall Gazette ') 
which yesterday at the Guildhall hailed the arrest of Mr. Parnell, is 
echoed this morning through the length and breadth of Great Britain. 
With hardly a dissentient voice the English and Scotch press com- 
mends the imprisonment of the President of the Land League. The 
divisions of party politics are fused by the intensity of race antagonism 
and the passionate impatience of Englishmen when they are con- 
fronted by what they regard as unreasonable and irritating opposition. 

A glance at the papers of the period fully confirms this. 
Liberal and Tory alike speak. ' It is an unhappy necessity,' 
says the ' Daily News.' ' The country will welcome the 
arrest of Mr. Parnell,' writes the ' Standard.' ' Mr. Parnell \s 
arrest,' declares the ' Edinburgh Courant,' ' is by far the most 
popular step which the Government has taken.' ' We believe.' 
exclaims the ' Glasgow Daily Mail,' ' that the tenant-farmers 
of Ireland will rejoice at their deliverance from the yoke 
of the League, and that the semi-seditious body— if there 
be any need for the qualification — will speedily fall to pieces 
of its own accord.' ' The arrest of the leader of the Land 
League,' says the ' Manchester Examiner,' ' is a painful and 



468 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

an odious step.' It consoles itself, however : ' We must,' it 
says, ' bend our back to the burden, and, satisfied of the recti- 
tude and honesty of the Government, must give them our 
entire support in endeavouring to cope with a crisis for which 
they at any rate are not responsible.' ' The arrest of Mr. 
Parnell,' says the ' Dundee Advertiser,' ' will be received 
throughout Scotland with something of savage satisfac- 
tion.' 1 

The voice of the politicians was equally unanimous. Sir 
Stafford Northcote endorsed the arrest ; so did Mr. Ashton 
Dilke ; so did the working-men members, Mr. Burt and Mr. 
Broadhurst. Mr. Broadhurst said he was ' ready to arrest a 
thousand Parnells rather than the starving Irish people should 
have withheld from them the blessings which the Legislature 
has conferred : no greater or more beneficent boon having ever 
been bestowed by any Legislature in any age than the Irish 
Land Act' 2 

I need scarcely point out that Mr. Broadhurst entirely 
misrepresented the purpose of Mr. Parnell's policy. That 
policy could not be better described than in the language of 
a bitter opponent of Mr. Parnell, the Duke of Marlborough. 
' I have no doubt myself,' said his Grace, ' that if the Land 
League were permitted to continue; in any case they would 
by their powerful organisation work the Land Act in a 
manner which might be highly dangerous to the property of 
the landlords.' 3 

Meanwhile in Ireland the arrest of Mr. Parnell was 
mourned throughout the country as a national calamity. In- 
dignation meetings were held, unless they were dispersed by 
the police or the soldiery, in every town and village in the 
country, and in most cases the shutters were put on the win- 
dows as in times of death and funerals. The country was 
swept by a passion of anger and grief, the more bitter be- 
cause it had to be suppressed. Troops were poured into the 

1 These extracts are quoted from the Pall Mall Gazette of Friday, October 14, 
1881. 

2 Quoted by Mr. J. Morrison Davidson, in a letter to the Echo {Free/nail's 
Journal, October 22, 1881). 

8 Freeman's Journal, October 25, 1881. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE . 469 

country, and, by way of striking wholesome terror, Dublin was 
given over for two days to the police ; and then occurred 
scenes of brutality the records of which it is not possible 
to read even at this distance without bitter anger. Under 
the pretext that there was danger of a riot in O'Connell — 
then Sackville — Street, it was taken possession of by large 
bodies of police, and when a crowd of boys, attracted by this 
curious spectacle, began to jeer and groan, the police made 
charges, struck the people with their batons and clenched fists, 
and kicked those whom they felled. 

Their conduct (writes the ' Weekly Irish Times,' x a Conservative 
organ in Dublin) was such as to appear almost incredible to all who 
had not been to witness it. . . . After every charge they made, men, 
amongst them respectable citizens, were left lying in the streets, blood 
pouring from the wounds they received on the head from the batons 
of the police, while others were covered with severe bruises from the 
kicks and blows of clenched fists, delivered with all the strength 
that powerful men could exert. 

This was before 10 o'clock ; later on, another and perhaps 
even worse scene was enacted : — 

The police drew their batons, and the scene which followed 
beggars description. Charging headlong into the people, the con- 
stables struck right and left, and men and women fell under their 
blows. No quarter was given. The roadway was strewn with the 
bodies of the people. From the Ballast Office to the Bridge, and 
from the Bridge to Sackville Street, the charge was continued with 
fury. Women fled shrieking, and their cries rendered even more 
painful the scene of barbarity which was being enacted. All was con- 
fusion, and nought could be seen but the police mercilessly batoning 
the people. Some few of the people threw stones, of which fact the 
broken gas-lamps bear testimony ; but, with this exception, no resist- 
ance was offered. Gentlemen and respectable working men, return- 
ing homewards from theatres or the houses of friends, fell victims to 
the attack, and as an incident of the conduct of the police it may be 
mentioned that, besides numerous others, more than a dozen students 
of Trinity College and a militia officer — unoffending passers-by — 
were knocked down and kicked, and two postal telegraph messengers 
engaged in carrying telegrams, were barbarously assailed. When 

1 October 22, 1881. 



470 . THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the people were felled they were kicked on the ground, and when 
they again rose, they were again knocked down by any constable 
who met them. 1 

Nor is it on newspaper accounts only that we have to rely 
for a record of the brutality of the police on this occasion. ' I 
have seen,' said Mr. Dwyer Gray, M.P., at a meeting of the 
Dublin Corporation, at which the question was discussed ; ' I 
have seen the conduct of the police. ... I saw them beating 
children and acting in the most wanton and shameful way : 
attacking respectable men, beating them, striking them on 
the face, when going on their way quietly and peaceably as 
they had a perfect right to do.' 2 ' I can speak from personal 
observation,' declared Alderman Harris, . . . 'as to the gravity 
of the result produced by whoever had the command of the 
police making that immense display of force last Saturday. 
. . . The police were running after and beating respectable 
men.' 3 When these facts were brought before the Chief 
Secretary by a deputation from the Corporation of Dublin, 
his calm reply was, ' It cannot be altogether a milk-and-water 
business clearing streets.' 4 Is it possible that Joe Brady or 
some other of the ' Invincibles ' was in the crowd, and thus 
saw the Metropolis of Ireland given over to this savagery ? 

It was assuredly a strange proof of Mr. Gladstone's pro- 
position, that the Irish longed to be liberated from the tyranny 
of Mr. Parnell, that the population had to be dragooned by 
overwhelming military and police forces into the tame accept- 
ance of Mr. Parnell's imprisonment. The two nations, in 
fact, stood opposite each other — both unanimous. Not a 
voice in England was raised in defence of Mr. Parnell ; not 
a voice in Ireland was raised in favour of Mr. Gladstone. 
Ireland and England confronted one another in universal and 
undisguised hatred. This was a strange pass to which Mr. 
Forster's statesmanship had brought the two countries, and 
yet Mr. Gladstone was able calmly to declare within a few 
days of those dreadful scenes in Dublin City and in the 
universal outburst of grief and anger from every part of 
Ireland : ' Our opponents are not the people of Ireland, we 

1 Weekly Irish Times, October 22, 1881. 
2 Freeman's Journal, October 18, 1 88 1. s lb. * lb. 



THE COERCION STRUGGLE 471 

are endeavouring to relieve the people of Ireland from the 
weight of a tyrannical yoke.' ' And, said a paper so able and 
representative as the ' Scotsman ' : — 

Mr. Parnell is not entitled to speak for more than a numerically 
insignificant, though noisy and unscrupulous, minority of the Irish 
people. This truth justifies the confident hope the Premier expressed 
in his Friday's speech as to the future of Ireland. 2 

The arrest of Mr. Parnell was followed by that of Mr. 
Dillon and Mr. O'Kelly. Mr. Sexton was lying ill in bed 
when the warrant came for his arrest also, and he rose imme- 
diately and accompanied the police to Kilmainham. War- 
rants were also issued for the arrests of Mr. Healy, Mr. Arthur 
O'Connor, and Mr. Biggar. Mr. Healy was on his way to 
Ireland to give himself up, when he was met at Holyhead by 
an official of the League and ordered to remain in England. 
Mr. Arthur O'Connor was also ordered by Mr. Parnell to 
escape arrest if he could, and so was Mr. Biggar. The 
realistic leader of the Irish movement was anxious that as 
many of his followers as possible should remain outside the 
gaols, so as to carry on the war against the enemy ; and his 
followers, though reluctantly, accepted his mandate. In 
Dublin and throughout the country every person in any way 
connected with the League was arrested. It was evidently 
the resolve of the Government to destroy the organisation by 
the removal of its most active members. Finally, the Land 
League was suppressed. 

At last the extremists, whom Mr. Parnell had successfully 
opposed, were victorious. When Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster 
became their allies they were for the first time irresistible. 
The Land League leaders, now inside gaol, were brought face 
to face with a situation in which moderation was no longer 
possible. Resort was had to the final weapon, and, after 
various consultations, the ' No-Rent ' manifesto was issued. 

1 Pall Mall Gazette, Oct. 29, 1881 
» Quoted in Pall AMI Gazette. 



472 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE IRISH NEMESIS. 

To appreciate properly the effect of the Coercion rigime 
which now followed, it is necessary to recall to the reader 
the state of Ireland as it was when Parliament met in 
January 1881 with Ireland as it became during the six 
months that followed the arrest of Mr. Parnell. It will be 
remembered that Mr. Forster himself had to acknowledge 
that the country at that period was comparatively quiet ; that 
the Returns, when dissected, proved that the real amount of 
crime was much less than the gross total led one to believe ; 
and that it was repeated so often, and by so many different 
speakers, as to become a platitude of debate, that the number 
of murders, instead of having increased, had actually been less 
during the days of the Land League supremacy than at any 
previous period of great political excitement and impending 
social changes. The time had come when the Government 
resolved to apply Coercion in earnest, when every restraint of 
decency or prudence was cast aside, and Ireland was ruled 
with a rod of iron indeed. It is hard even now to write of the 
acts perpetrated at this period under the direction of Mr. 
Forster without some display of temper or some heat of lan- 
guage. The pretences on which the Coercion Acts had been 
originally obtained from Parliament were completely forgot- 
ten. The Acts, as I have shown by extract after extract from 
the Ministerial speeches, were obtained for the purpose of 
putting down crime or the incitement to crime, and for that 
alone. They were employed— openly and avowedly employed 
— for the purpose of compelling the payment of rent. The 
warrants of arrest contained the confession of this entire 
change of purpose and breach of faith. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 473 

Thus in one of the warrants against Mr. Parr, ell, the 
charge was that he had intimidated divers persons to compel 
them to abstain from doing- what they had a legal right to do 
— namely, to pay rents lawfully due by them. The non- 
payment of rent may be a moral offence, but assuredly it was 
not the kind of crime and outrage for the perpetration or 
abetting of which Mr. Gladstone declared the Coercion Act 
was required. 

Mr. Forster had declared that the Acts were required not 
against any large section of the population but against the 
mauvais sujets, the village tyrants, and a few scattered mis- 
creants throughout the country ; and writs were issued against 
men in almost every class of society ! Mr. Gladstone declared 
that the Act would not be used against any body of men for 
any form of debate or proposal, but against the perpetrators 
and the abettors of outrage ; and the chief purpose to which 
the Act was soon applied was to suppress the Land League 
and all Land League meetings and all Land League speeches. 

The proceedings taken against women did perhaps more 
than anything else to expose the savage character of the 
regime it now established, and to create the fiercest popular 
passion. A number of ladies had taken up the work of the 
organisation as it fell from the hands of the men whom Mr. 
Forster had sent to gaol. What that work was will presently 
appear. Against several of these ladies the Chief Secretary 
ordered legal proceedings. The method of these proceedings 
was characteristic of a nature at once coarse, clumsy, and 
savage. In the reign of Edward III. a statute was passed 
against prostitutes and tramps. It was under a statute like 
this that young ladies, brought up tenderly and delicately, 
were tried, and such of them as were convicted were con- 
demned in sentences which cannot be described as lenient. 

Mr. Clifford Lloyd was now able to enjoy himself to the 
top of his bent. He pranced around the country with as 
large an escort as could have been required by the Czar 
passing through a Polish city ; he arrested wholesale ; he 
trampled on the laws of the country, and carried out laws of 
his own suiting ; he employed boldly and shamelessly every 
weapon of Coercion for the purpose of extracting the rent. 



474 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Thus the Coercion Act became simply one of the additional 
agencies of the rent office ; and the non-payment of rent was 
raised to the dignity of a criminal offence. One well-authen- 
ticated case of this kind will sufficiently exemplify the state 
of things that existed in Ireland at this horrible period. A 
Mrs. Moron ey was engaged in a fierce struggle with her 
tenantry in Miltown-Malbay, County Clare. One of her 
tenants was summoned by Mr. Clifford Lloyd and was told 
that unless he paid his rent he would be put in gaol. He 
refused to pay his rent ; Mr. Lloyd kept his word : the man 
was arrested at daybreak on the following day under one of 
Mr. Forster's warrants ; he was sent to a prison in Ulster, as 
far removed as possible from his business and his family ; and 
while he was away his wife died, and it was to a desolate 
home he returned after his release. 

Huts were erected by the Ladies' Land League for the 
purpose of sheltering the evicted, who, as will be presently 
seen, were reaching at this point numbers that startled and 
shocked and terrified the whole country. Mr. Lloyd insisted 
that the huts were for the purpose of intimidation and not 
for shelter, and arrested and sent every person to gaol who 
was engaged in their erection. Against women he was at last 
allowed to have plenary powers. He sent Miss McCormack 
to gaol for six months ; he sent Miss Reynolds to gaol for 
six months ; he sent Miss Kirk to gaol for three months. Of 
course he always denied that he imprisoned these women at 
all. All he did was to ask them to promise to keep the 
peace ; and he sent them to gaol in consequence of the 
refusal. But he knew, and everybody knew, that no man or 
woman could, with a particle of self-respect, or with any hope 
of retaining the respect of any of his or her people, submit 
to any compromise with the brutal tyranny that was then 
desolating their country. 

Other magistrates, fired with noble envy of Mr. Lloyd's 
exploits, also made war upon women. Mrs. Moore was sent 
to gaol for six months ; and Mr. Becket sentenced Miss Mary 
O'Connor to six months' imprisonment. 

Two extracts from the reports of Hansard will complete 
this part of the picture. When Mr. Forster's attention was 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 475 

called to any of the brutalities of Mr Clifford Lloyd, this was 
how he answered : — 

When an action is taken up by a magistrate, it is done on his own 
responsibility, and it would be a most serious matter to suppose that 
I, as representing the Executive, have power to interfere with the 
action of the magistrates. * 

It is scarcely necessary to remind the historical student 
that this answer of Mr. Forster is the repetition of a trick 
venerable in the history of despotisms. The magistrate who 
is the tool and the creature of the Government, who carries 
out its wishes and behests, is represented as a perfectly 
independent judicial functionary, with whom the Executive 
would not, and even dare not, interfere. Mr. Clifford Lloyd 
and the other magistrates who were carrying out this work 
throughout Ireland, were as much the servants and creatures 
of Mr. Forster as the smallest messenger in his office or the 
chambermaid in his house. They were appointed by the 
Lord-Lieutenant ; they could be dismissed by the Lord- 
Lieutenant. Most of them held appointments that were dis- 
tinctly temporary and renewable at short periods — from 
quarter to quarter — and with large emoluments dependent on 
the continuance of the agitation, of which they were among 
the most unholy brood. And these were the gentlemen from 
interference with whom Mr. Forster shrank with the delicate 
respect for constitutional forms which he was displaying in 
so many ways at that moment. Later on Lord Spencer and 
Mr. Trevelyan adopted the same expedient of representing 
as independent judicial authorities a number of magistrates 
whom they employed on task work, and who were as de- 
pendent on them as the supernumerary writers on the chief 
of a Civil Service Department. 

A second extract from Hansard will describe the treat- 
ment to which the ladies were subjected who were sentenced 
to be imprisoned by Mr. Clifford Lloyd and the other 
magistrates. 

Mr. Labouchere asked the Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant 
of Ireland whether it is true that Mrs. Moore, Miss Kirk, and Miss 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxxviii. p. 167 1. 



476 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

O'Connor, who have been sentenced to various terms of imprison- 
ment under an ancient Act for alleged intimidation, by different 
stipendiary magistrates, are kept in solitude for about twenty-three 
hours out of twenty-four ; and whether the time has arrived when, 
in the interests of the peace and tranquillity of Ireland, these ladies 
should be restored to their friends ? 

Mr. Trevelyan : Sir, the, ladies named in this question have 
been committed to prison in default of finding bail, and are treated 
in exact conformity with the prison rules; and, according to the rules 
for ' bailed prisoners,' they are allowed two hours for exercise daily, 
and are therefore in their cells for twenty-two out of twenty-four 
hours. They can at once return to their friends on tendering the 
requisite sureties. 1 

Thus it will be seen that these women were suffering far 
more severely than the men arrested under the Coercion Act. 
The prisoners under the Coercion Act were allowed to have 
communication with each other for six hours out of every 
day. The young ladies sentenced by Mr. Clifford Lloyd 
were in solitude throughout the entire day. In the prisons 
in which they were placed there were none but the degraded 
of their own sex ; and sometimes the young ladies attended 
their devotions in close proximity to the prostitutes and 
thieves of their district. 

Up and down the country, meantime, the police authori- 
ties were pursuing the other methods which are associated 
with unchecked authority and the efforts to override a 
people. The same war was made on lads' and boys as on 
women. A lad named Lee was brought before the magis- 
trates for whistling. 2 Thomas Wall, another lad, was accused 
by another constable for the same offence, and in addition was 
charged with abusive language. The abusive language was 
whistling 'Harvey Duff' — a song which spoke in satirical 
terms of the police. ' Do you consider,' the accusing con- 
stable was asked, ' that whistling " Harvey Duff " is using 
abusive language ? ' ' Yes,' answered the friend of Mr. 
Forster, ' I do; and I swear it is.' 3 On April 16, 1882, a 
policeman in Waterford rushed into a shop where a woman 
was engaged in reading ' United Ireland,' threw her down, 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxix. p. 1404. - lb. vol. cclviii. p. 8S8. 

3 lb. vol. cclxv. p. 184. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 477 

and, kneeling on her stomach, searched her in an indecent 
manner. 1 In Cappamore, County Limerick, a sub-constable 
attacked a girl named Burke, twelve years of age, because 
she was singing ' Harvey Duff' ; he drew his bayonet and 
inflicted a wound. 2 

Was it true, asked Mr. Healy with his characteristically 
grim humour, that Daniel O'Sullivan, aged nine or ten years, 
' who appeared before the magistrates crying,' had been prose- 
cuted by the magistrates, under the Whitcboy Act, for having, 
at two o^clock in the day, by carrying a lighted torch in the 
public streets at Millstreet, promoted a certain unlawful meet- 
ing contrary to the Statute made and provided, and against 
the peace of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, her crown and 
dignity ? Was it not true that the child's offence really con- 
sisted in heading a procession of young fellows who were 
after tilling the farm of a woman whose husband had died ? 

Mr. Forster found fault with the levity of the question, 
and then proceeded to state the serious facts of the case. 
The youth Daniel O'Sullivan was the leader of a party of 
boys from twelve to seventeen years of age ; O'Sullivan him- 
self was about twelve. When their procession was stopped 
the boys dispersed, but they reassembled at the instigation of 
grown-up persons. 3 

The police made domiciliary visits by day and by night 
into the rooms alike of women and of men. They broke into 
meetings ; they stood outside doors and took the names of 
all persons entering into even the house of a priest to take 
steps for relieving the tenantry. 4 They tore down a placard 
in Tipperary calling upon the people to vote for the popular 
candidates for poor-law guardians ; 5 and at a meeting of the 
Drogheda Corporation, the sub-inspector of police interposed 
in the proceedings with the declaration that he would not 
allow the word Coercion to be used. 6 

Meantime the Government exhausted the resources of 
civil power in helping on the now unchecked savagery of the 
alien oligarchy against the nation. Troops were supplied in 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxviii. j p. 993, 1266. * lb. vol. cclxvii. p. 25. 

8 lb. cclx. p. 1543. 4 lb. vol. cclxvii. p. 1277. 

* lb. vol. cclxviii. p. 12. 6 lb. vol. cclxvii. p. 1285. 



478 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

abundance ; horse, foot, and artillery, took part in the work of 
eviction ; and sometimes the blue-jacket and the war-vessel 
were employed in the unholy task of turning out the starving 
to die. To make the grotesqueness and horror of the situation 
complete, it sometimes happened that the vessel which had 
come to help in evicting, had but twelve months before visited 
the same shore and the same people to distribute among them 
the food which English charity had bestowed to save them from 
starvation. It is perhaps only in a system so absurd and un- 
natural as the legislative union between England and' Ireland 
that a contradiction so glaring as generosity in one year and 
starvation in the next is possible. 

The Ministry, consisting of men, as Mr. Bright proudly 
declared when he was passing a Coercion Act, who had de- 
voted their lives to the cause of freedom, did everything it 
could to urge and hound on the landlords in the crusade of 
extermination. To crush the tenantry became a necessity to 
the life of the Ministry, and at every means that promised 
this fatal victory they grasped with the cruelty of the dying. 

Under the influence of teaching like this — with the Govern- 
ment making their cause their own ; with all the resources of 
the British Exchequer and the British naval and military 
forces at their back ; with Mr. Forster to imprison every popu- 
lar journalist and every popular orator ; with Mr. Clifford Lloyd 
to make non-payment of rent a crime, and the erection of huts 
for the outcast and the dying an act of intimidation — the 
landlords acted as they have always done at every period 
when Fate and the British Government have together delivered 
the Irish tenantry helpless into their hands. They were, 
too, in the mood to take full advantage of all these things. 
For the first time in all their annals of power they had 
been confronted, defied, and beaten. Under the regime of the 
Land League they had been compelled to surrender rights of 
immemorial date — to lower their rack-rents, to stay eviction, 
to treat their tenants as fellow-beings, and not as so many 
ciphers or serfs. The mighty organisation which had made 
this revolutionary change was beaten and dead ; they had not 
only rights to reconquer but passion to slake, not only rents 
to exact but vengeance to feed. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 479 

They went to work with a will that recalled the spirit of 
the glorious days which followed the Great Famine. 

The evictions for the first quarter of 1881 were 1,732 
persons ; for the second quarter ending June 30, they had 
increased to 5,562 persons ; for the quarter ending Septem- 
ber 30, the evictions were 6,496 ; and for the quarter ending 
December 31, they were 3,851. During the entire year of 
1881, 17,341 persons had thus been deprived of their rights 
as tenants, and the greater proportion of them had been 
absolutely thrown on the roadside. It will be seen that 
eviction was proceeding for at least six months of the year 
in geometrical progression, and that the year 1881, under the 
influence of Mr. Forster's regime, was reaching a total of 
evictions for any approach to which we must go back to the 
dread years of the Famine. 

Mr. Gladstone, it will be recalled, had, but a little more 
than twelve months before, demanded the Disturbance Bill, 
on the ground that the eviction of 15,000 people was an event 
so horrible as to shame the humanity of every man, and to 
demand the prompt intervention of Parliament ; and now a 
year was passing away with not 15,000 but 17,341 victims. 
Nor, of course, did those evictions take place without scenes 
of heartrending cruelty or desperate encounter. In County 
Clare a man was killed by a body of police who were pro- 
tecting a process-server; in April a policeman and two 
farmers were killed ; in June a police-charge killed a man ; 
in October a man was killed at a Land League meeting by a 
bayonet- thrust from a policeman ; and later on in that month, 
an event occurred which produced widespread and bitter in- 
dignation. A body of police were sent to collect poor-rates 
due by a number of miserable tenants on the estate of a Mr. 
Blake. Disputes have arisen as to how the struggle between 
the police and the people began, but the police fired into 
the people, several .were wounded, and two women, Ellen 
McDonough, a young girl, and Mrs. Deare — a feeble old 
woman of sixty- five years of age— were wounded and subse- 
quently died. A verdict of ' Wilful Murder ' was given in 
both cases against the police. 

The reader has now the causes which produced the fit of 



480 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

absolute frenzy which passed over Ireland during the winter of 
1 88 1 and the spring of 1882. The country stood at bay, and 
driven from constitutional and open movement, with speech 
and writing and organisation suppressed, with every day 
adding a new wrong and a new insult, with wholesale eviction, 
exile, and starvation once more confronting the nation as in 
the dread past, the population resorted to the secret organisa- 
tion and the revolting crimes which have been the inevitable 
and the hideous brood of despotic regimes. A wild and 
horrible wave of crime passed over the country ; the days 
of 1880 might well have been looked back to as extraordi- 
narily peaceful in comparison with the period which had now 
set in, and neither the Queen's Speech nor the Marquis of 
Hartington could any longer declare that there were but com- 
paratively few murders. 

In the year 1880, the number of murders was eight, there 
was no homicide, and there were twenty-five cases of firing at 
the person. In 18S1, there were seventeen cases of murder, 
there were five homicides, and sixty-six cases of firing at the 
person ; and in the first six months of 1882, there were fifteen 
murders, and forty cases of firing at the person. All these 
crimes, of course, are crimes of an agrarian character. The 
increase of crime was brought over and over again before 
Parliament. ' The present measures of Coercion,' said Mr. 
Gorst, on March 28, 1882, 'have entirely failed to restore 
order in Ireland. The assizes just concluded show that the 
amount of crime now was more than double what it was in 
all the various districts last year ; in almost every case the 
juries failed to convict, and therefore there must be some 
new departure on the part of the Government' l 

And on another occasion Mr. Gorst gave from the charges 
of the judges a proof of his statement, and the proof was 
startlingly damning. 

At the Longford Assizes, there were 98 cases of agrarian 
outrages against 75 for the preceding year ; in the County 
Clare there were 356 cases, as against 254 in the preceding 
year ; in County Sligo 138 cases against 97 in the preceding 
year ; in Queen's County 62 cases against 21 in the preceding 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxviii. p. 210. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 481 

year ; in County Donegal 4,105 cases against 645 ; in County 
Tipperary 159 crimes against 75 in the preceding year, and 
so on. 1 

Curiously enough, crime was most abundant in some of 
the districts in which Coercion had raged in its most active 
and its most outrageous form. Judge Barry stated at the 
assizes in the County of Clare, that the outrages which had 
occurred for the two months previous to the assizes were 
twice as numerous as in the corresponding month of the 
previous year, 2 and the period of increased crime was the 
period of Mr. Clifford Lloyd's appearance in County Clare. 

Meantime the author of this cycle of eviction, imprison- 
ment, and brutal murder, persevered in his system with fatu- 
ous obstinacy, every day prophesying that Coercion would be 
triumphant, and that murder, or organisations to murder, 
were all but extinct. 

At that moment there was, as everybody now knows, right 
under his feet, within a few yards of his own office, a con- 
spiracy more murderous and more powerful than any that 
had existed in Ireland for probably half a century. And 
while the Chief Secretary was grimly congratulating himself, 
as he passed to the station for England, on the news of com- 
plete victory over crime he was bringing to his colleagues, 
Tiis steps were being dogged by a gang of assassins armed 
against his life. 

But the colleagues of Mr. Forster and the public opinion 
of England read the signs of the times more intelligently. 
The daily list of arrests and crime proved at last too sicken- 
ing, and so strong was the revulsion of feeling, even in 
England, against the horrible state of things in Ireland, that 
the Conservatives showed some inclination to put a restraint 
upon the career of Mr. Forster. 

Then these various outrages upon the people were brought 
constantly before the House of Commons by the Irish mem- 
bers, and naturally began in time to tell. An uneasy feeling 
grew up that after all such a crusade against every form of 
free speech, and free meeting, and free action, against women 
and children, was not entirely creditable to the institutions 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxviii. pp. 680-7. 2 lb. p. 1003. 



482 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

or the reputation of England. The daily increase, at 
the same time, in the numbers, character, and atrocity of 
crimes in Ireland, helped to shake Mr. Forster's system ; 
the prevarication of which he was frequently guilty spread 
uneasy doubts in his official pictures of Ireland. The theory 
that he was warring, not with the Irish people, but with a 
certain small and criminal section among the population, 
received its final overthrow in the local elections throughout 
Ireland, in every one of which the men whom he had sent 
into gaol as either abettors or perpetrators of crime, were 
raised to the highest positions in the gift of their fellow- 
citizens. It was when his position was thus already damaged 
that Mr. Sexton was able to bring before the House of 
Commons a startling document. This was a circular issued 
to the constabulary of the County of Clare by the County 
Inspector. Beginning with a statement that attempts would 
probably be made on the life of Mr. Clifford Lloyd, it went 
on : — 

Men proceeding on his (Mr. Clifford Lloyd's) escort should be 
men of great determination as well as steadiness ; and even on suspi- 
cion of an attempt, should at once use their firearms, to prevent the 
bare possibility of an attempt on that gentleman's life. If men 
should accidentally commit an error in shooting any person on sus- 
picion of that person being about to commit murder, I shall exonerate 
them by coming forward and producing this document. 1 

Mr. Forster saw the spectre of coming ruin in the dis- 
covery of a document like this ; prevaricated, and professed to 
require time to see whether the document was genuine. The 
interval he probably hoped to employ in explaining away to 
his colleagues the damning testimony of the document itself. 
But Mr. Sexton saw through this expedient, and insisted on 
raising a discussion at once, and when that discussion was 
over, Mr. Forster was a ruined man. 

At the same moment he was assailed from another 
quarter. The Conservatives had seen plainly the rise of a 
tide of popular disgust with Mr. Forster and his system 
among the British people — who, to do them justice, are 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxviii. pp. 991-1000. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 483 

but poor hands at a continuance of the brutal methods of 
despotic countries — and thought the moment had come when 
a different method might be proposed for dealing with Ireland. 
The whole legislation of the Ministry had evidently broken 
down ; the Coercion Act had not put down crime ; the Land 
Act had not closed the land question ; and against both the 
one measure and the other, Conservative members proposed 
hostile motions. . Sir John Hay gave notice of the following 
motion : — 

That the detention of large numbers of Her Majesty's subjects in 
solitary confinement, without cause assigned, and without trial, is re- 
pugnant to the spirit of the Constitution ; and that, to enable them to 
be brought to trial, jury trials should for a limited time (in Ireland), 
and in regard to crimes of a well-defined character, be replaced by 
some form of trial less liable to abuse. l 

And Mr. W. H. Smith gave notice of his intention ' to ask the 
First Lord of the Treasury if the Government will take into 
their consideration the urgent necessity for the introduction 
of a measure to extend the purchase clauses of the Land Act, 
and to make effectual provision for facilitating the transfer of 
the ownership of the land to tenants who are occupiers on 
terms which would be just and reasonable to the existing 
landlords.' 2 

If the leaders of the Land League required any justifica- 
tion of their policy, here it was. They had declared all along 
that Coercion would fail, and that peasant proprietary was the 
only final and practical settlement of the Irish Land question ; 
and while they were in prison, and after their country had 
passed through the agony of a fierce and bloody strife, two 
English Conservatives came forward to filch and to adopt 
their scheme. 

On the Ministry the effect was almost instantaneous. 
Their hearts had remained untouched by the sight of the 
misery they were inflicting upon Ireland ; they had made up 
their minds to conquer Ireland whatever might be the cost to 
the Irish people, and their consciences slept while the tornado 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxviii. p. 1945. 2 Times, March II, 1S82. 



484 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of crime and eviction was passing over the unhappy country. 
It awoke at once when the opposite party menaced their 
positions. These were the events which prepared the Govern- 
ment on their side for a reconciliation with the Irish leader. 
On his side the motives for desiring a peace are apparent, 
and, in spite of all the absurd mystification with which the 
transaction was surrounded, can be understood by any rea- 
sonable person. Mr. Parnell was alarmed at the vast increase 
in the evictions ; the greater number of the evicted he knew 
were absolutely unable to pay their rents, the arrears which 
had come as a damnosa hcereditas from the famine years 
being a burden they were incapable of shaking off; and he 
was much too clear-headed a man to suppose that in the long 
run the purse of the Land League could hold out against 
the Exchequer of England. The land war had brought ex- 
penditure on the scale of war, and the immense funds of 
the Land League were rapidly approaching the irreducible 
minimum. Mr. Parnell did not indulge in any illusions ; 
he wanted to win a substantial victory for the people whose 
interests were under his charge, and such a victory he did 
win. 

The Kilmainham treaty, as it was called, was the most 
abject and complete surrender ever made by the powerful 
Government of a great state to the imprisoned leader of a 
small, poor, and unarmed nation. All the forces of the em- 
pire had been pitted against Mr. Parnell, and he had beaten 
the empire. The terms of the Government are sufficient 
proof of this. These terms, summed up briefly, were : First, 
the failure of Coercion was acknowledged frankly and unre- 
servedly. The completeness of the confession involved the 
sacrifice of the men chiefly responsible for Coercion ; and 
accordingly Mr. Forster and Lord Cowper resigned from 
the Ministry. Then there was to be no renewal of Coer- 
cion. This is a statement which was much contested during 
the debates that came soon after ; but no man in his senses 
believes that Coercion would have been pressed forward by 
the Government which had shed Mr. Forster and released 
Mr. Parnell. It is quite possible that the Crimes Bill would 
have been introduced, but it would have been hung up after 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 485 

a stage or two, and Ireland would have returned to the 
ordinary law. 1 

And the other concessions made by the Government would 
have made Ireland perfectly tranquil, and would have com- 
pletely done away with the necessity for coercive legislation. 
The first indication of the .coming surrender of the Govern- 
ment was the reception given by Mr. Gladstone to the new 
Land Bill brought in by Mr. J. E. Redmond on behalf of 
the Irish party. This Bill proposed an amendment of the 
Healy and the Purchase clauses of the Land Act, the inclusion 
of leaseholders, but, above all, the remission of those arrears 
which shut out so many of the tenants from all possible benefit 
under the Land Act and from all prospect or hope. 

Mr. Gladstone received the proposals of the Bill with great 
favour, practically held out that the larger and more remote 
questions of Land Reform would be favourably considered ; 
and, with regard to the question of the Arrears, made state- 
ments amounting to a promise that the Government shared 
the convictions of the Irish members, and would be prepared 
to deal with the question immediately. 

Such, then, were the terms of the so-called Kilmainham 
treaty : abandonment of Coercion, the sacrifice of the Coer- 
cion Minister, and the acceptance, on the other hand, of the 
chief demands of Mr. Parnell for amendment of the Land Act 
in less than a year after it had become law and been declared 
the last word upon the land question, and the immediate 
settlement of the burning question of Arrears, The House of 
Commons certainly fully appreciated the greatness and com- 
pleteness of Mr. Parnell's victory. The first few days after 
his release from prison were days of veritable triumph. He 
received every recognition, public and private, of being master 

1 The plan of the Government was to give the Rules of Procedure priority 
over the renewed Coercion, and it was one of Mr. Forster's most bitter charges 
against the Government, both during that Session and the Session following, when 
the question was again raised, that Mr. Gladstone did give this priority to the 
Procedure Rules over Coercion. Nobody at all experienced in Parliamentary 
affairs need be told that if the Procedure Rules had got the priority there would 
be no more mention of the Crimes Act during the Session. It certainly would 
have taken from May, the date of Mr. Forster's fall, to the end of the Session to 
pass the Procedure Rules alone. 



486 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of the situation. Doubtful friends or bitter enemies rushed 
up to shake his hand and worship the rising sun. He was 
recognised to be — as beyond all question at that moment he 
was — the most potent political force in the British Empire. 

From no man did Mr. Parnell receive a recognition so 
eloquent, though probably so grudging, of the supremacy of 
his power and the completeness of his triumph at this moment 
as from his baffled and beaten opponent. By a singularly 
dramatic appropriateness, it was during the speech in which 
Mr. Forster was explaining his resignation that Mr. Parnell 
entered. ' There are two warrants,' Mr. Forster was saying, 
' which I signed in regard to the hon. member for the city 
of Cork also for intimidation. I have often asserted that these 
arrests for intimidation were 

' At this point,' goes on Hansard, ' the entrance of Mr. 
Parnell into the House and the cheers with which he was 
greeted by the Home Rule members, drowned the voice of 
the right hon. gentleman and prevented the conclusion of the 
sentence from being heard.' * 

And then Mr. Forster went on to use the following words, 
which clearly prove the omnipotence of Mr. Parnell at this 
moment : — 

A surrender (said the Chief Secretary a few moments later) is 
bad, but a compromise or arrangement is worse. I think we may re- 
member what a Tudor king said to a great Irishman in former times: 
' If all Ireland cannot govern the Earl of Kildare, then let the Earl of 
Kildare govern Ireland.' The king thought it was better that the Earl 
of Kildare should govern Ireland than that there should be an arrange- 
ment between the Earl of Kildare and his representative. In like 
manner if all England cannot govern the hon. member for Cork, then 
let us acknowledge that he is the greatest power in Ireland to-day. 2 

The prospect of the Irish people was equally bright. The 
promises of the Government and the attitude of the Conserva- 
tive party as shown by the motion of Mr.' W. H. Smith, 
demonstrated that the struggle was about to be closed in the 
fashion which the Land League leaders had originally proposed. 

With the close of the land struggle, with the abandonment 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxix. p. 108. 2 lb. p. ill. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 487 

of Coercion and the destruction of the hated Coercion Minister, 
tranquillity promised to immediately return. On this point 
two authorities as antagonistic as Mr. Forster and Mr. William 
O'Brien are completely agreed. Speaking of the desirability 
of his resigning in the interests of peace, Mr. Forster said : — 

I think there is a greater chance of an immediate diminution of 
outrages. There is the great pleasure amongst hon. members opposite 
and their friends of getting rid of the late Chief Secretary ; and if 
this puts men into good humour in Ireland, as well as here, it may 
be that in their efforts to stop outrages— if they make them at all 
—they will be stronger than they would otherwise have been. 1 

In a speech made in 1883, Mr. O'Brien pointed out how 
while the agrarian outrages for the first six months of 1882 
were 1,010, they were only 365 for the next six months. 
He pointed out how in June, the first month after Mr. 
Forster's resignation, the outrages fell to 283, of which 155 
were threatening letters, while in the month of April they 
were 462. Mr. O'Brien took the County Clare as the most 
typical of all the counties of Ireland, because it was the county 
where the fight between landlord and tenant was most despe- 
rate, and where both sides were most extreme in their course. 

In January 1882 Clare had the sinister privilege with 41 
outrages of being highest on the criminal roll. In February 
the number was again 41, and in the black list of evictions 
Clare stood highest in all Ireland for the first quarter of 1882 ; 
for in that quarter 52 families of 299 souls were evicted, and 
only seven families were re-admitted. In July, after Mr. 
Forster had been got rid of, the number of evicted families 
had a fall to seven, and the agrarian offences to nine, of which 
three were threatening letters.' 2 Finally in the pages of the 
' Times,' which so often have been defaced with articles bru- 
tally unfair to Ireland, there was this startling confession : — 

The recurrence of St. Patrick's Day, with its traditional celebra- 
tion, its old toasts and its old memories, reminds us that the Irish- 
man of history and of tale is nowhere to be found. . . . The Irishman 
is becoming like the Englishman; that is, the Englishman of the dull, 
morose, self-satisfied sort —the man who sees everything and every - 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxix. p. 117. 2 Hansard, vol. cclxxxi. pp. 513-15. 



488 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

body from his own point of view, and pursues his object with a dogged 
indifference to all reasons, interests, feelings, and beliefs. The Irish- 
man, like the Englishman, is now righteous in his own eyes, and his 
righteousness is to hold money and land, and have the use of it as 
long as he can. . . The Irishman has become more a thing of 
earth. . . , He is taking root. Of course this is what his friends 
most desire ; but it will be with the usual consequences. No one ever 
planted himself deeper in the earth without becoming more earthy. . . 
The ancient slave was a very droll fellow, and a great relief to the 
high-toned Greek and Roman civilisation. He lost his native charm, 
and did not always acquire another when he became free. ... So 
long as the Irishman taught himself after his own fashion, and man- 
aged his affairs generally after his own fashion, he successfully deve- 
loped the most genial and fertile part of his own nature, and was far 
more witty, humorous, poetic, and social than the poor English clod- 
hopper, artisan, or tradesman. But he did not succeed in acquiring 

a good position or his rightful share in the products of the soil 

He has actually become a citizen of the world and a very 'cute 
fellow. He has played his cards well, and is making a golden 
harvest. He has beaten a legion of landlords, dowagers, and en- 
cumbrances of all sorts, out of the field, and driven them into work- 
houses. He has baffled the greatest of legislatures, and outflanked 
the largest of British armies in getting what he thinks his due. Had 
all this wonderful advance been made at the cost of some other 
country, England would have been the first to offer chaplets, testi- 
monials, and ovations, to the band of patriots who had achieved it. 
As the sufferers in the material sense are chiefly of English extraction, 
we cannot help a little soreness. Yet reason compels us to admit 
that the Irish have dared and done as they never did before. They 
are welcome to that praise. But they have lost, and it is a loss we all 
feel. Paddy has got his wish — he is changed into a landowner. 1 , 

Everybody knows how in an hour Mr. Parnell was reduced 
from this eminence of omnipotence to a position of absolute 
and apparently irretrievable disaster. The tragedy of May 6 
produced a tempest of passion that swept away for the 
moment the power of Mr. Gladstone and of Mr. Parnell for 
good to Ireland. Those who remember the fatal Sunday 
when the news reached London, and saw the Irish leader and 
his colleagues that day, can find consolation in the reflection 
that their fortunes can never see a darker or gloomier hour. 

1 Times, March 17, 1882. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 489 

One of the victims of the knives of the Invincibles was known 
to and popular with the Irish members, as he was with all 
sections of the House of Commons, and the kindly feeling 
was recognised which impelled him to offer himself as the 
bearer of a new message of peace to Ireland. Wherever the 
Irish race lived, the depth and the pitifulness of the tragedy 
and the magnitude of the disaster were felt and appreciated ; 
and in cities as distant as St. Louis, or San Francisco, or Mel- 
bourne, or Wellington, the fatal day filled Irish households 
with mourning. 

The Government found themselves unable to resist the 
tide of passion that passed over their country ; there was a 
hoarse cry for Coercion ; and the Ministers felt that, unless 
Coercion were dealt out with a liberal hand, they could not 
hold office for twenty-four hours. It is nevertheless to be re- 
gretted that the men who had turned out Mr. Forster because 
Coercion had failed, should have at the same time adopted his 
policy. They would probably have been able after a while to 
meet and defeat the movement, powerful though it was, for Co- 
ercion : the Ministry which survived the death of Gordon could 
also have survived the Phoenix Park assassinations, and, even 
if it had not, it would have done inestimable service towards 
England and Ireland by showing that even a great Ministry 
was ready to sacrifice itself rather than sanction any further 
exclusion of the Irish people from the Constitution. And it 
may be said, too, with some certainty that the passion of their 
own people, though fierce, would have been temporary ; for it 
is a characteristic of the English nation to be short-lived in its 
violence, and, though there were one or two outbursts of in- 
sensate fury, it must be acknowledged that the English nation, 
as a body, behaved on this terrible occasion with self-restraint 
and dignity. The newspapers, it is true, did their best in one 
or two instances to fan popular excitement into fury. The 
' Times ' — true to its immemorial traditions — suggested that 
the Irish population of England, unarmed and innocent, should 
be massacred for a crime which they abhorred, and that the 
Irish political leaders should be made responsible for a catas- 
trophe which had dashed all their hopes. But these shameful 
incitements to violence remained innocuous before the good 
sense of the English people. 



49Q THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

The most peculiar result of the Phcenix Park assassinations 
was the change it made in the position of Mr. Forster. The 
dread tragedy which was the outcome of the frenzy that his 
policy had generated, was taken to be the vindication of that 
policy, and the undoubted growth of a large and potent 
murderous conspiracy was held to be the proof of the utility 
of coercive measures against the preparation and the 
perpetration of crime. If the Phcenix Park assassination 
preached with its bloody tongue one doctrine more loudly 
than another, it was the futility and the wickedness and dis- 
aster of the policy for which Mr. Forster was responsible. 

In the debates which ensued nothing could be more 
unanimous than the condemnation of the policy of Mr. Forster 
himself. It was one of his own colleagues who pronounced 
the most damning condemnation of himself and his Coercion 
Act. 

It was assumed (said Sir William Harcourt) .... that the Pro- 
tection of Person and Property Bill was an appropriate remedy, and 
that if we only had the summary power of arrest it would be suf- 
ficient to put down crime. My right honourable friend who had 
charge of that measure said, 'We can discover the persons who 
commit these crimes — these village ruffians ; we know them ; we 
can put them in prison ; we can put down crime.' That turned out 
not to be so. The men were shut up ; more men were shut up 
time after time ; yet crime went on increasing. It was never sug- 
gested — nor did it occur to anybody — that that measure would have 
failed so completely as it did in suppressing crime. The consequence 
was that the shutting up of these people did not sensibly diminish 
crime. On the contrary, the more people were shut up the more 
crime increased. 1 

But, in the heat and fury of party conflict, logic is silent. 
The Conservatives believed, or professed to believe, that Mr. 
Forster and his policy had been vindicated by the murder of 
Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke. Time-servers of 
Mr. Forster's coarse type can never see a great popular outburst 
without an instinctive desire to turn it to some personal profit. 
Even if he had not been personally involved in the matter at 
all, Mr. Forster could no more have resisted an attempt to ex- 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxxvi. pp. 4.29-30. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 49* 

ploit the death of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke 
than he resisted the temptation to exploit the popular tempest 
over the death of Gordon. But, of course, he was doubly in- 
terested in turning the outburst of popular anger and sorrow- 
over the Phcenix Park assassinations to his own justification, 
and proceeded to make as much capital as he could out of 
the tragedy. He attacked his former colleagues, he made 
questionable use of Cabinet communications, he did every- 
thing he could, while professing friendship for Mr. Gladstone 
and the other members of the Ministry, to deal them as many 
and as deadly stabs as it was in his power to do. He had his 
reward in the welcoming cheer with which his rise was for 
a while always acknowledged by the Conservative party, 
and by the fulsome eulogies which he received in all their 
speeches. Of course the conduct of Mr. Forster was very 
contemptible, but he was less contemptible than the rank 
and file of his own party. It was at once amusing and 
disgusting to observe the change which came over the at- 
titude of the Ministerialists towards him. The very men 
who had been denouncing the Irish members as little better 
than assassins for their attacks upon Mr. Forster, began to 
assail him quite as mercilessly now that he attacked the 
Ministry ; and as in the interests of party, they were once 
pleased that he should be exalted, they were now as ready 
that he should be mercilessly sacrificed. 

The Crimes Bill, which followed the Phcenix Park murders, 
was fought by the Irish members doggedly, and was marked by 
the same scenes as were enacted in the session of 1881. The 
progress of the Bill was terribly slow ; amendments followed 
amendments. There came the system of relays, and then 
an all-night sitting. Once more tempestuous passion was 
aroused on both sides. It was seen that some blow would be 
struck. On the morning of Saturday, July 1, Sir (then Dr.) 
Lyon Playfair declared the following Irish members guilty of 
obstruction, and suspended them en masse: — Mr. Biggar, 
Mr. Callan, Dr. Commins, Mr. Dillon, Mr. Healy, Mr. Leamy, 
Mr. Marum, Mr. Metge, Mr. McCarthy, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, 
Mr. O'Donnell, Mr. Parnell, Mr. R. Power, Mr. Redmond. 
Mr. Sullivan, and Mr. Sexton. And later in the day the 



492 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

following members were also suspended : — Mr. Byrne, Mr. 
Corbet, Mr. Gray, Mr. Lalor, Mr. Leahy, Mr. A. O'Connor, 
Mr. O'Kelly, Mr. W. H. O'Sullivan, and Mr. Sheil. 

This had the most extraordinary consequences. Thus 
Mr. John Dillon had been entirely absent during the night, 
and when he arrived in the morning to enter the House, 
he was refused admission, and, for the first time, learnt 
of his suspension. Similarly, Dr. Commins, Mr. T. D. 
Sullivan, and Mr. Biggar had been absent during the night. 
Mr. Richard Power had actually not spoken even once during 
the debates in Committee on the Bill, and Mr. Marum had 
taken so little part that Sir John Hay, a Conservative member, 
got up and protested against his suspension. It thus became 
evident that if such a ruling as this were allowed, it would be 
possible for a stupid or an arbitrary Speaker or Chairman 
of Committees to deprive Ireland of the services of all her 
representatives at some moment particularly convenient to 
the Ministers. 

It is reasonable to suppose that this step was taken on the 
initiative of Sir Lyon Playfair himself. It certainly was 
denounced in private by nearly every member of the House 
to whatsoever section he belonged, and the Ministers repudi- 
ated it with some eagerness. But whatever interference there 
be in the House of Commons with the rights of Irish members 
the House of Commons is ready at once to condone ; and 
every attempt on this, as on every other occasion, to bring the 
ruling of the presiding officer to the test of discussion, was 
steadily prevented. Nevertheless the Irish members had their 
revenge ; in one respect immediately, in another at a later 
period. 

The Irish members were so exasperated by the action of 
Sir Lyon Playfair and by the evident determination of the 
House to stand by it in public, however much they objected 
to it in private, that they resolved to take no further part in 
the discussion of the Bill. 

The remainder of the story I will tell in a sketch which 
I wrote at the time : — 

Vengeance soon overtook the Government for condoning the offence 
of their subordinate. The first effect of it was to produce the resolve 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 493 

of the Irish members to abstain from all further participation in the 
discussion of the Crimes Bill. The history of the resolution passed by 
the Parnellites on the subject is curious. When the House met on 
Thursday the party had not yet made up their minds what was to be 
done, though three or four had talked the matter over in the smoking- 
room of the House on Monday night. When a division takes place 
in Parliament, members retire to the lobbies, then run around the 
House. It was during one of these divisions that Mr. Sexton brought 
forward the resolution. A hurried and excited debate took place, 
and was not concluded when the members re-entered the House. 
There was, however, immediately afterwards, a second division ; the 
debate was renewed, and the resolution was adopted by a majority of 
1 6 to 4. On returning, Mr. Justin McCarthy got up to state the course 
of himself and his colleagues. It will reveal to you the tolerance 
and good taste of the House of Commons when I tell you that this 
eminent author and consistent politician is sometimes howled at by 
a mob of ignorant juveniles on the Liberal side. When he read the 
resolution, Mr. Gladstone — who has been looking very haggard and 
very anxious for some weeks — was visibly disturbed, but not so his 
followers. When Mr. McCarthy came to announce that the Irish 
members would take no further part in the discussions on the Crimes 
Bill, there was a mighty cheer, almost the loudest I have heard since 
the famous day when the Liberals roared themselves hoarse on 
hearing that Michael Davitt had been sent back to penal servitude. 
When, afterwards, we rose to leave the House, the same insulting and 
exultant cheer was raised once again and followed us mercilessly 
until we had disappeared from sight. I dwell upon this fact because 
it forms one of the most important incidents in view of what imme- 
diately followed. 

The course of the Crimes Bill since our departure went with the 
greatest smoothness and tranquillity until the afternoon of yesterday. 
On that day the clause had to be discussed which dealt with searches 
for arms, and the point of difference between the Government and 
their opponents was that the Government wished to restrict it to the 
day, unless where an illegal meeting was being held at night, while 
their opponents desired that there should be the same unlimited 
right to search by night as by day. The debate was in many 
respects sensational and exciting. Gladstone saw early that he would 
have very difficult work to pass his proposal, and he made a speech 
so strong that people thought it pointed to resignation. But the 
Whigs were not to be moved even by the most pathetic appeal from 
the ' Grand Old Man.' Mr. Goschen, who is trying to make a Whig 



494 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

revolt along with Mr. Forster, made a violent speech against the 
Government from the Liberal benches, an attack the more effective 
because he is a professed Liberal, and because he was always careful 
to speak of Mr. Gladstone, even while he was stabbing him in the 
back, as his ' right honourable friend.' But a more significant 
speech, as showing the present state of feeling towards Mr. Gladstone, 
was that of the Hon. Mr. Lambton. This member has a strange 
history. He is the son of one Earl of Durham, and the twin brother 
of another. Though there was but a quarter of an hour between his 
birth and that of his brother, he was, according to our precious law 
of primogeniture, deprived of title and property and rights. His 
father was, however, a sensible and considerate man — saved 100,000/% 
invested it in land, and so was able to leave his younger son a 
property worth between 10,000/. and 12,000/. a year. The Durhams 
have always been Liberals, and one Earl of Durham was a Liberal 
and something more : a strange, passionate, strong man, who was at 
once a nobleman and a Radical, who made Canada and ruined him- 
self, and who fretted out his heart and his life in baffled hopes and 
ambition. There is always a good deal of interest, therefore, attached 
to anything a scion of this family may do. Up to the present, young 
Mr. Lambton has done nothing to gratify this curiosity. He has sat 
in a dark corner on the furthest bench behind the Ministry, and has 
obstinately held his peace. When he stood up yesterday there was 
a general inquiry all -round the House as to who he w T as. A small, 
dapper young fellow, dressed in a short and jaunty coat, he looked a 
mere school-boy, and everybody expected that we w r ould have had 
one of those stuttering, stumbling, and dreadfully nervous little 
speeches, such as we are accustomed to hear from the shambling 
young creatures that represent noble houses in Parliament. But 
there was nothing of the kind. In an icily cold voice, with perfect 
self-possession, and a calmness that might have made Captain 
Hawtree burst with envy, this stripling proceeded to attack Mr. 
Gladstone in the most relentless manner. The House stood aghast, 
and then, when it recovered, burst out with alternate cheers and howls. 
Mr. Gladstone's brow grew overcast, and then gradually became as 
sombre and dejected as the visage of the Crushed Tragedian. 

Meamvhile scenes of equally intense excitement had been going 
forward in other parts of the Parliamentary building. The Minis- 
terialists were driven almost frantic with excitement and alarm, and 
were trying all sorts of methods to avert the coming defeat. I 
must tell your readers one incident which I shall recall to the end 
of my life with grim satisfaction. The Irish members are treated 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 495 

unfairly and insolently by the Ministerialists as a body, but there are 
some individuals who stand out in bold relief even from their howl- 
ing companions . One of these is a colonel, an excellent type of the 
English swashbuckler — tall, corpulent, with a fierce fair moustache, 
and a general air of what an American once called 'you-be-d — dness.' 
During the all-night sittings this gentleman always makes himself 
particularly objectionable, partly because on these occasions he par- 
takes of the grilled bones and champagne with which our younger 
legislators while away the hours of waiting. In the fight of last 
week this colonel organised a small group which kept up a loud 
conversation, interspersed with loud guffaws whenever an Irish 
member was speaking, with the evident intention of either confusing 
or irritating him into some heat or imprudence of language. Well, 
yesterday I saw this colonel in one of the rooms of Parliament, panic- 
stricken and pale, and begging the Irish members whom he has 
been constantly insulting to come in and vote for the Government. 
Another most objectionable person is a lawyer who sits immediately 
behind Gladstone, and, in hope of a fat office, eats as much dirt as 
the great man may offer. He constantly howls at us, and is always 
ready to assail our position. In face of the whole House this 
creature yesterday came on a begging mission from Gladstone to the 
Irish members. 

I have said in face of the whole House ; for one of the dramatic 
peculiarities of the situation, as you have already heard, doubtless, 
was that the Irish members were witnesses of these death throes of 
the Ministry. A gallery runs on both sides of the House, and here 
were gathered Sexton, Dillon, Healy, and others of the most active 
and able of ParnelPs following, looking down calmly for the moment 
on the arena which they had quitted. There they were in far and 
away the most conspicuous position of the whole Assembly, clearly 
visible not only to the members, but to the occupants of the Ladies', 
and the Diplomatic, the Speaker's, and the Strangers' Galleries. It 
was most amusing to watch the glances of piteous appeal which 
Trevelyan, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and other members of the 
Government occasionally directed to this quarter. However, these 
followers of Parnell, whatever may be their other faults, know their 
own minds, and are as defiantly insensible to the cajolings as they are 
to the menaces of the Administration. I cannot say as much for all 
the gentlemen who nominally follow the lead of the member for 
Cork. Some of their number, cursed with the souls of footmen and 
the spirits of spaniels, got into a dreadful state of. alarm when they 
found that the Government was about to be beaten, and came 



496 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

piteously whining about their stronger brethren, asking them to 
go in and vote. Of course, these slavish counsels were rejected, and 
few of those who gave them were ready to act upon them. When 
the division was called, there was intense excitement in the House, 
and nobody could tell what the result was going to be, and the 
House heaved like a tempestuous sea. The Irish members had to 
leave the Gallery in which they had hitherto been seated, for it was 
technically within the limits of the House, and it is a rule of Parlia- 
ment that if you be within the House when the division is called you 
must vote one way or another. The Parnellites accordingly took 
refuge in the Diplomatic Gallery. When the defeat of the Govern- 
ment was announced, this small body, which might have saved the 
Administration, laughed down triumphantly on their baffled foes, 
and those on the other side pointed and glared up at us with looks 
that were intended to kill. And so the Irish party avenged their ex- 
pulsion and the insulting cheer by which their departure from the 
House was received. 1 • 

The later vengeance the Irish members were able to 
take on Dr. Playfair for his ruling, and on the House for its 
sanction of the ruling, was to have the rule about obstruction 
so modified, when the Rules of Procedure were changed, as 
to make ' constructive obstruction ' after Dr. Playfair's fashion 
an impossibility for the future. 

A word is required for another Bill of the session of 1882. 
In the latter portion of this session Mr. Gladstone introduced, 
and, after a short struggle with the Marquis of Salisbury, 
succeeded in passing, the Arrears Act. If Englishmen were 
teachable on their Irish mistakes, assuredly the introduction 
and carriage of this Bill ought to have taught them a great 
lesson. 

For it was the Arrears Bill that ought to have brought 
before the minds of Englishmen the real meaning of the crisis 
through which Ireland had been passing. The testimony as 
to the circumstances which necessitated the Arrears Bill 
comes from many different sources. Mr. Gladstone spoke in 
favour of the Bill, Mr. Forster spoke in favour of the Bill. 
It was the great anxiety of Mr. Parnell in Kilmainham, and 
afterwards of Mr.Trevelyan in Dublin Castle. Captain O'Shea, 
in giving an account of the interview which preceded the 

1 Gladstone's House of Commons, pp. 231-5. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 497 

release of Mr. Parnell, declared that the Arrears were the 
question which chiefly disturbed the Irish leader's mind. 
When Captain O'Shea expressed his opinion that the con- 
tinued imprisonment of the 'suspects' was exercising a most 
pernicious effect in Ireland, with his hope that the Govern- 
ment would make his release permanent, Mr. Parnell replied, 
according to a note which the member for Clare took imme- 
diately afterwards : — 

Never mind the ' suspects ' ; we can well afford to see the Coercion 
Act out. If you have any influence do not fritter it away upon us ; 
use it to get the Arrears practically adjusted. Impress on every 
one your own opinion as to the necessity of making the contribution 
from the State a giftj and not a loan ; and further the equal necessity 
of absolute compulsion. The great object of my life (added the 
hon. member) is to settle the land question. Now that the Tories 
have adopted my view as to peasant proprietary, the extension of the 
Purchase clauses is safe. You have always supported the leaseholders 
as strongly as myself ; but the great object now is to stay eviction by 
the introduction of an Arrears Bill. 1 

He had felt (Mr. Parnell said in the same debate) with reference 
to the question of Arrears in Ireland, as relating to the situation of the 
smaller tenants, the very gravest anxiety and responsibility for many 
months ; and he was rejoiced that the hon. member had found some 
way of placing the views of himself and those with him, before the 
Government. They had been aware from what they had seen in the 
newspapers, and from the information of prisoners who came in from 
time to time, and who received letters from different parts of the 
country, that evictions in large and very much greater numbers than 
had occurred up to the present, were imminent unless some such 
proposal as the Prime Minister had announced were made in regard 
to arrears. They had anticipated that there would be three times as 
many evictions in the present quarter of the year as there were in the 
first quarter, when 7,000 persons were turned out of their homes. 
They had also every reason to believe that, owing to the fact that the 
smaller tenantry in Mayo, Galway, Sligo, and parts of Roscommon, 
Donegal, Leitrim, and Kerry were sunk in arrears to the extent of 
three or four years — in many cases four or five or six years, and in 
some cases ten or twelve years — the year's or half-year's rent, by the 
payment of which the tenants had obtained a temporary respite from 
eviction, would be but a temporary respite, and that the coming 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxix. p. 783. 

K K 



498 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

winter would see evictions resumed against the smaller tenants to an 
extent never witnessed in the country since 1848. They feared also 
that the outrages which had been so numerous during the last six 
months would increase as the winter came on ; and that a state of 
affairs in Ireland would follow, owing to the non-settlement of this 
question, the end of which they could not possibly foresee. l 

Equally emphatic is the testimony of Mr. Trevelyan : — 

» 

I think those hon. members have left out of sight what is perhaps 
the governing consideration of this question why .... a very large 
number of members think it necessary to assist the tenants in Ireland. 
It is because the times have been most exceptional. ... So far as I 
can remember, no instance of this sort in which money has been asked 
to assist the tenants of Ireland can be quoted since the famine of 1846. 
The reasons why we have come forward now are the bad years of 1878 
and 1879. I only put into other words what was said by the right 
hon. member for Bradford, when I say that the sudden rise in Irish 
agrarian crime which took place in 1879-80 was connected with the 
discontent which was fostered in an atmosphere of misery. There 
were some parts of the country where the people could not pay their 
rents. They could not keep body and soul together without chari- 
table assistance, and the helplessness and despair of these people 
gave the first material thirst for agitation. 2 

Again : — 

Every day (went on the Chief Secretary) the Government gets 
reports of evictions, and whenever these evictions are of tenants who 
can pay their rents and will not, the Government is very carefully 
informed by their officers. That is not the case with all evictions, 
and at this moment in one part of the country men are being turned 
out of their houses, actually by battalions, who are no more able to 
pay the arrears of these bad years than they are able to pay the 
National Debt. I have seen a private account from a very trust- 
worthy source — from a source anyone would allow to be trustworthy 
— of what is going on in Connemara. In three days 150 families 
were turned out, numbering 750 persons. At the head-quarters of the 
Union, though only one member of each family attended to ask for 
assistance, there was absolutely a crowd at the door of the workhouse. 
It was not the case that these poor people belonged to the class of 
extravagant tenants. They were not whisky drinkers ; they were not 
in terror of the Land League. One man who owed 8/. borrowed it 
on the promise of repayment in six months with 4/. of addition — a 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxix. pp. 792-3. * lb. pp. 1327-8. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 499 

rate of interest which hon. members could easily calculate — that he 
might sit in his home. The cost of the process of eviction amounted 
to 3/. 17s. 6d. I am told that in this district there are thousands in 
this position — people who have been beggared for years, people who 
have been utterly unable to hold up their heads since those bad 
years, and whose only resource from expulsion from their homes is 
the village money-lender. 1 

And it was the tenantry whose miserable condition is de- 
scribed so eloquently and sympathetically that the landlords 
of Ireland were evicting during 1881 and 1882, at the time of 
the suppression of the Land League. It was tenants of 
this kind, 17,341 of whom were cast from their homes in the 
year 1881. It was to evict tenants of this kind Mr. Forster 
was filling the gaols, was arming the landlords with soldiers 
and police. It was to evict miserable and despairing wretches 
like these that the mighty forces of the British Empire were 
pitted against Ireland and Mr. Parnell. Assuredly it is not 
too much to ask when these were the issues on both sides 
that the sympathies of all real haters of wrong and suffering 
should rejoice that the final victory remained with Mr. Parnell 
and the tenantry, instead of with Mr. Forster, Coercion, and 
the evicting landlords. 2 

On the Arrears Bill Mr. Gladstone staked the existence of 
his Government, and even risked a collision with the House 
of Lords; but that Bill was the grant in 1882 of a de- 
mand contemptuously rejected in 1881. The Bill itself was 
an adaptation of one brought in by Mr. Redmond, and again 
the Bill brought in by Mr. Redmond had been drafted — every 
clause and every line of it — within the walls of Kilmainham 
by Mr. Parnell. This is another of the many proofs that it is 
only through the suffering of Irish leaders that the dull, cold 
ear of English ignorance can be penetrated. Mr. Parnell was 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxix. pp. 1328-9. 

2 The following sentence from Mr. Brand, who is no friend of Mr. Parnell or 
the Land League, sufficiently explains the difference between the position of 
Irish tenants and English tenants, and the action of Irish and English landlords 
in this as in many other agrarian crises before and since : — In England during the 
recent bad seasons landlords had made very large remissions, varying from 75 to 
50, 40, 20, and 10 per cent. Bur, he was sorry to say, that Irish landlords had 
not, in any large number of cases, shown a similar spirit. —/#. p. 1321. 

K K. 2 



500 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

quite content, of course, that his scheme should be taken up 
by Mr. Gladstone and passed into law ; but it seemed a little 
hard that he should have had to go through six months' 
imprisonment in order to educate the mind of the Prime 
Minister. 

The recess that followed the Session of 1882 is chiefly 
remarkable for the first manifestations of the spirit in which 
the Crimes Act was to be worked. As the Red Terror of 
France was succeeded by the cruelties and horrors of the 
White Terror, the regime of Lord Spencer followed on the 
frenzied crime that grew out of the policy of drastic Coercion. 
A system of jury-packing was resorted to of a shamelessness 
that was considered to have been buried with the days of 1 848. 

As a specimen of the jury-packing the following facts 
suffice : Two hundred jurors were summoned to try seven 
cases under the Crimes Act, and the jury panels represented 
a proportion of about four and a half Catholics to one Pro- 
testant. 1 The gentlemen sworn as jurors in these seven cases 
were almost exclusively Protestants. A proportion of four 
and a half to one would have represented forty-five Catholics 
and ten Protestants. By the efforts of Mr. George Bolton, 
the Crown solicitor, the juries were so selected that the 
numbers were nine Catholics and forty-one Protestants. The 
first jury contained three Catholics and nine Protestants. 
When this jury disagreed a second jury was selected con- 
sisting of eleven Protestants and one Catholic. The Crown 
solicitor ordered aside twenty Catholics and three Protestants. 
On the second trial of Patrick Higgins the jury consisted of 
eleven Protestants and one Catholic. Thirty Catholics and 
one Protestant were ordered to stand aside. Tom Higgins 
was tried by a jury of ten Protestants and two Catholics. 
The Crown set aside fifty jurors, almost wholly Catholics. 
Michael Flynn was convicted by ten Protestants and two 
Catholics. The Crown ordered aside fifty-three jurors, forty- 
one of whom were Catholics. 2 

Thus the men who were accused of having taken part in 
the terrible struggle with landlordism were now brought up, 

1 Pall Mall Gazette, Sept. 6, 1882 ; quoted in How the Crimes Act is 
Administered, p. 50. ' l How the Crimes Act is Administered, p. 50. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 501 

when their organisation had been destroyed, before juries 
consisting exclusively of men drawn from the ranks of their 
enemies. The temper of these enemies was at the time, 
naturally enough, roused to fury, at once by the sense of in- 
sult and wrong endured, and of vengeance safe though tardy 
in its .arrival. So fierce, indeed, was the spirit of the land- 
lord party, that it led to exhibitions scarcely possible in any 
country but one in which different classes are divided by the 
hatred of centuries and the exasperations of antagonistic 
creed, and race, and class. The courts were crowded by 
representatives, male and female, of the landlord party ; and 
when the verdict of conviction doomed another hapless being 
to the terrors and horrors of violent death, the representatives 
of landlordism exhibited the savagery of their joy by public 
applause within the walls of the court itself. 

To render conviction still more assured, huge bribes were- 
offered for informers, and the cases were tried by judges 
well known for perpetuating on the bench the odious tradi- 
tions of the Crown prosecutor. Of course Judge Lawson 
played a prominent part in these trials. Judge Keogh was 
dead ; Judge Fitzgerald had received well-merited reward by 
being raised to the English peerage ; but Judge Lawson re- 
mained of the precious trio who had reached the judicial seat 
through popular politics. 

Judge O'Brien, who had been recently raised to the 
Bench from the position of a Crown prosecutor, also took 
part in these trials, and carried to the judicial Bench the 
virulence that always distinguishes the Crown prosecutor in 
Ireland. Thus three men were tried for the Lough Mask 
murder. When Patrick Higgins, the first man, was convicted, 
Judge O'Brien made this extraordinary declaration : ' I con- 
sider it my duty to state that in my opinion the prisoner is 
the least guilty of the persons concerned in this murder, and 
that the evidence has produced in my mind a firm belief that 
the design of this murder did not originate with him.' Two 
men had yet to be tried for this murder, and even a London 
journal had to protest against the unprecedented unfairness 
of the case of these two men being prejudiced by such an 
observation. Four of the jurors who convicted Michael 



5 o2 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Flynn, another of the men accused of the same murder, had 
served in the trial of Pat Higgins, and were present at the 
moment when the judge made the remark that Higgins was 
the least guilty of the three. 1 One of these jurors gave the 
strongest condemnation of the action of the judge, though 
perhaps unconsciously. The jury, he said, concurred in the 
statement that Higgins was the least guilty of the three ; but 
' he had refrained from making it lest it might prejudice the 
trial of the remaining two prisoners.' 

Some of the prisoners who were tried before such jurors 
and such a judge did not know a word of English — for all 
they knew, the cases might as well have been tried in Arabic — 
and they could only gaze in dumb bewilderment while the 
bloody game was going on of which their necks were the 
forfeit. 

Tried before tribunals thus constituted, convictions came 
fast and furious ; until one prisoner summed up the proceed- 
ings to the satisfaction of the whole shocked and horrified 
nation in the memorable words : ' This is a slaughtering 
house.' 

The character of these trials was over and over again 
brought before the House of Commons, and if the damning 
figures already brought forward were not sufficient to con- 
demn the Government, the Irish members could bring for- 
ward the testimony of two English newspapers, the one in 
eulogy and the other in condemnation of the system, which 
would sufficiently establish their case. ' We must, to convict 
murderers,' declared the ' Daily Telegraph,' ' secure by hook 
or crook, by law or challenge, metropolitan Protestants and 
loyal juries.' 2 ' No decently impartial person,' said the ' Pall 
Mall Gazette,' ' can deny that there has been jury-packing, 
that there has been a vast deal of oppression, that persons 
have been treated in a way that in England would be found 
intolerable.' 3 

The worst part of these proceedings on the part of the 
Government was their absolute needlessness. The public 
mind and conscience of Ireland were in the frame to welcome 

1 How the Crimes Act is Administered, p. 44. 2 Oct. 2, 18S2. 

3 Aug. 14, 1883. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 503 

the conviction, after fair trial and by properly constituted 
juries, of the perpetrators of crime. The outbursts of bloody 
passion which had followed the arrest of Mr. Parnell had left 
behind feelings of profound horror, and these feelings were 
transformed into a sense of sickened loathing by the Maam- 
trasna massacre. But the effect of trials so conducted was 
to drive back public sympathy from the law to the criminals, 
and the conviction of each successive murderer was followed, 
not by a sense of relief but of anger and of pity. The cir- 
cumstances of the trials, too, added a new cause to those 
already existing for hatred between different classes and 
creeds in Ireland, and the Catholic looked again on his 
Protestant fellow-countryman of the landlord class as an 
enemy more cruel and more relentless than any outside their 
common land. 

A worse sentiment soon came to undo whatever good the 
conviction of the vindication of the law might have produced. 
There began to spread the uncomfortable feeling that trials 
conducted in such a manner must lead to some cases of un- 
just conviction. This feeling was increased by the dying 
declarations of innocence from more than one scaffold by 
men with the ropes around .their necks, and about to be 
plunged into the Dark Unseen. To such declarations the 
Irish people attach peculiar importance. Among them re- 
ligious faith holds unchecked sway ; and according to their 
convictions, the dying are about to enter an eternity of 
happiness or of woe. Before the hour of death their religion 
gives them the means of reconciliation and forgiveness of 
sin ; and to them it was incredible that men of their faith, 
after they had passed through the observances of their creed, 
should have imperilled their eternal salvation by going be- 
fore the judgment seat with a lie upon their lips. This con- 
viction soon became general, and to-day it may be said that 
it has passed far beyond Ireland. 

The horrors at the execution of one of the persons con- 
victed of the Maamtrasna murder tended to excite this feel- 
ing to one of supreme and angry horror. Myles Joyce, one of 
the men convicted, went to the scaffold still shouting out in 
the Gaelic — the only tongue he knew — asseverations of his 



504 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

innocence. He was still appealing for mercy when the rope 
was put around his neck ; some bungle in the arrangements 
led to the rope catching in one of his arms ; Marwood, the 
executioner, had to complete his ghastly task by kicking the 
shoulder of the unhappy man, and it is reported that he 
added some words of savage scorn. 

That scene will live in Irish memory to the end of time. 
The case of Myles Joyce was afterwards brought before the 
House of Commons by Mr. Harrington, and his innocence 
was — or at least the unsatisfactory character of the trial was — 
admitted by some of the ablest lawyers who took part in the 
debate. While, however, many stopped short of this point, 
there was not a single lawyer who took part in the debate — 
save the Irish Solicitor- General — who does not count in such 
a discussion — who did not express grave dissatisfaction with 
the manner in which the trial had been conducted. 

But this was long after the trials had taken place, and 
the remains of Myles Joyce had been reduced to calcined 
ashes. While the agrarian trials were going on, Lord Spencer 
and the rest of the bureaucracy decreed that no voice should 
be raised in protest or in criticism. Mr. Edmund Dwyer 
Gray admitted into his newspaper (' The Freeman's Journal ') 
— the chief journal of Ireland — some comments on the no- 
torious packing of the juries, and on the misconduct of a 
jury who spent the night before they sent a man to the scaffold 
in a drunken debauch. 

Judge Lawson summoned Mr. Gray before him, and 
although he was at the time high sheriff of the city, and was 
known as a man of moderate views and careful expression, 
sent him to prison for three months and inflicted a fine of 
500/. Thus it was understood that, while the courts were 
turned into shambles, there was to be throughout the country 
the silence of the grave ; the bloody work was not to be stayed 
by one word of comment or reproof. 

At the same time the landlord press was to be allowed to 
hound the juries on by praise and blame to convict the prisoners. 
Thus, after. the first trial of Pat Higgins for the Lough Mask 
murder, when the jury disagreed, the ' Daily Express ' was 
allowed to declare that the jury had been ' demoralised,' 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 505 

while the second jury which convicted Pat Higgins was 
described as ' intelligent and independent.' J 

It was at this period that there began one of the strangest 
duels of Irish history. The letter in which attention had been 
called to the action of the jury in the Hynes case was written 
by Mr. William O'Brien ; and from this time forward he takes 
a part as one of the most prominent leaders of the Irish 
people. 

William O'Brien comes from a good stock, and was 
brought up from his earliest years in those principles of which 
he has become so prominent and so vigorous an advocate. 
On the day his elder brother was born, in 1848, the sub- 
inspector of police in Mallow had a warrant to search the 
house for firearms, but desisted from using it because of 
Mrs. O'Brien's illness, and on Mr. O'Brien giving his word 
that there were no arms in the house. O'Brien's father was 
one of the fiercest and most resolute spirits of the Young 
Ireland party, but afterwards, like so many of the men who 
survived the terrible abortiveness of that time, was by no 
means friendly to physical force movements. In time he 
had to remonstrate with some of his own offspring for their 
adhesion to Fenianism, but his mouth was closed whenever 
his remonstrances became too vehement by an allusion to 
this episode in the days of his own haughty youth. 

William was born on October 2, 1852, in Mallow, with 
which town his family on the mother's side has been connected 
from time immemorial. He received his education at Cloyne 
Diocesan College. This was a mixed school, attended by 
both Catholic and Protestant children. There was not the 
slightest sectarian animosity between the children of the 
different creeds, but there was plenty of political argument 
and differences. The Catholic Nationalists in the school 
formed a sort of small Irish party and held their own ; 
William O'Brien being successful in carrying off the class- 
prizes, while his brothers and others carried off the honours 
in cricket, football, and the like. William from his earliest 
years had the same principles as he professes to-day. Apart 
from the example of his father, he had in his brother a strong 

1 How the Crimes Act is A ministered, p. 43. 



506 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

apostle of the epistle of national rights. To this brother, his 
senior by some years, he looked up with that mixture of 
affection and awe which an elder brother often inspires in a 
younger. This brother was indeed of a type to captivate the 
imagination of such a nature as that of his younger brother. 
He was a man of inflexible resolution, great daring, and 
boundless enthusiasm. Among the revolutionaries of his 
district he was the chief figure, and there was no raid for 
arms too desperate, or no expedition too risky for his spirit. 
He took part with Captain Mackay, who was one of the 
boldest of the Fenian leaders, in many of the raids for arms 
on police barracks, and other places in the County of Cork. 
He was arrested, of course, when the Habeas Corpus Act was 
suspended, and underwent the misery and tortures which, as 
has already been described, were inflicted on untried prisoners 
under the best of possible Constitutions and the freest of pos- 
sible Governments. With this episode in the life of the elder 
brother, the brightness of the life of William O'Brien for 
many a long day ceased. His family history is strangely and 
terribly sad. The seeds of consumption seem to have been 
in several members of the family, and the disease reached 
its final stages with dread simultaneousness. 

In the O'Brien household there were at the one moment 
three members of the family dying. The father of the family 
had died before, and now two of his sons and his daughter 
were lying on their death-beds at the same time. The two 
brothers died on the one day, and a fortnight afterwards the 
sister died also. The shock to a nature so fiercely and in- 
tensely affectionate as that of William O'Brien, can well be 
imagined. The death of his father and the illness of his 
brothers had thrown to a large extent the support of the entire 
family on his hands, and to them he was not merely a brother 
but to a certain extent a helpful parent. It seemed for a 
time as if he were to be swept away by the same disease 
which had proved fatal to so many of his kin. He was only 
saved from death by a journey to Egypt, but he has never 
really recovered from the shock to his mind and heart which 
this family tragedy caused, and he is, and will be for ever, 
haunted by its memory. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 507 

The first thing which William O'Brien ever wrote was a 
sketch of the trial of Captain Mackay. This attracted the 
attention of Alderman Nagle, the proprietor of the ' Cork 
Daily Herald,' and he was offered an engagement upon 
that paper. There he remained until somewhere towards 
1876, when he became a member of the reporting staff of the 
' Freeman's Journal' He had become, meantime, and remains 
an expert shorthand writer. He did the ordinary work of the 
reporter for several years, with occasional dashes into more 
congenial occupation in special descriptions of particular pic- 
turesque incidents. . Whenever his work had any connection 
with the politics, condition, or prospects of his country, he 
devoted himself to it with a special fervour. It was his de- 
criptions of the County of Mayo in the great distress of 1879 
which first concentrated the attention of the Irish people on 
the calamity impending over the country. While he was 
working with an energy as great as that of any other journalist 
in Dublin at his own profession, his heart was in the cause of 
his people. When the Coercion Act was passed in 1880, he 
thought the moment had come for him to offer his services to 
maintain the fight in face of threats of danger, and he pro- 
posed through Mr. Davitt and Mr. Egan that he should take 
up some of the work of the League. His health, however, 
was at the time so weak that his friends feared that the im- 
prisonment which was almost certain to follow employment 
by the League would prove fatal to his constitution, and he 
was dissuaded from joining the ranks of the movement. In 
June 1 88 1, when the conflict between Mr. Forster and the Land 
League was at its fiercest, the idea occurred of establishing a 
newspaper as an organ of the League and Parnellite party. 
At once the thoughts of several people turned to the able and 
brilliant writer on the ' Freeman's Journal,' and he was in- 
vited by Mr. Parnell to found 'United Ireland' and to become 
its editor. 

It was then for the first time that the higher powers of 
O'Brien were discovered. Great as was his reputation as a 
writer of nervous and picturesque English, he had hitherto 
been unknown as the author of editorial and purely political 
articles, and few were prepared for the political grasp and 



508 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

feverish- and bewildering force of the editorials he contributed 
to the new journal. He had now been placed in the position 
for which his whole character and gifts especially fitted him. 
O'Brien is the very embodiment of the militant journalist. 
In some respects, indeed, his character resembles that of the 
French, rather than of the Irish, litterateur. Though he 
has keen literary instincts and a fine soul, his work is im- 
portant to him mainly because of its political result. Fragile 
in frame and weak in health, he is yet above all things a 
combatant, ready and almost eager to meet danger. If he 
had been born in Paris, he would probably have been found 
at the top of a barricade, or, like Armand Carrel, might have 
perished in a political duel. A long, thin face, deep-set and 
piercing eyes, flashing out from behind spectacles, sharp fea- 
tures, and quick, feverish walk — the whole appearance of the 
man speaks of a restless, fierce, and enthusiastic character. 

The times were such as to bring out to the full all his 
qualities of mind and character. As has been said, the foun- 
dation of ' United Ireland ' came in the agony of the struggle 
against Coercion. Its tone was a trumpet-call to further and 
fiercer advance instead of an appeal to retreat, and naturally, 
before long, Mr. Forster knew that either ' United Ireland ' 
should be crushed or the spirit of revolt would grow daily fiercer 
and more unbending. Mr. O'Brien was accordingly arrested 
the day after Mr. Parnell, under an Act which was obtained for 
imprisoning mauvais snjets and village tyrants, the perpetrators 
and participators, in crime ! It was a part of the sadness that 
hap followed his whole life that at the very moment of his 
arrest his mother was seriously ill, a woman whose nobility of 
character deserved the affection she received from her son. 
During his imprisonment the authorities were gracious 
enough to allow him out under escort to pay a visit to her, 
and he was released the day before her death. 

After various attempts to have the paper published in 
different places, sometimes in England and sometimes in 
France, ' United Ireland ' was finally suppressed by Mr. Forster. 
With the overthrow of Mr. Forster, the paper was again re- 
vived. It soon became evident that ' United Ireland ' was about 
to enter upon a struggle fiercer and more desperate than even 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 509 

that with Mr. Forster. Lord Spencer had obtained the 
Crimes Act, and throughout Ireland the White Terror of 
Coercion had succeeded the Red Terror of the Land League. 
It seemed as if the country would lie paralysed and terror- 
stricken under the regime of packed juries and partisan judges, 
of men dragged to Green Street as to a shambles, and of prison- 
cells throughout Ireland echoing to vain protestations of 
innocence from men convicted by carefully arranged tribunals 
of their fiercest and most exasperated political and religious 
opponents. It has been seen how at the same time every 
man who ventured to say a word against the oppression of the 
landlords was harried by a now omnipotent and unchecked 
police. In the stillness, which came over the country under 
such a regime, the voice of ' United Ireland ' rang out clear 
and loud and defiant as ever. The partisanship of the judges 
was ruthlessly attacked, the shameful packing of juries was 
exposed, and attention was called to the protestations of 
innocence that came from so many dying lips. These com- 
ments were such as are to be found in every English journal 
with regard to every case of murder in which there is the 
slightest doubt of the innocence of the prisoner, the suffi- 
ciency of the evidence, or of the conduct of the jury or the 
judge. In the despotic regime which it suited the Govern- 
ment to establish in Ireland at this period, it was held that 
no such criticism was permissible, and Lord Spencer and 
Dublin Castle resolved to put forward every weapon in the 
large armoury of Coercion for the purpose of crushing the 
fearless and brilliant journalist that seemed alone to stand 
between them and the country they wished to cow. Then 
began that long and lonely duel between Mr. O'Brien and 
Earl Spencer which lasted with scarce an interruption for 
three of the fiercest years in Irish history. 

The attack was opened by an action against Mr. O'Brien 
for what is called ' seditious libel' The meaning of seditious 
libel is, attacks upon the Administration which are not agree- 
able to the Administration. An action of this character is, of 
course, no longer possible in England. In the midst of this 
trial, a vacancy arose in the representation of Mallow, through 
the promotion of Mr. Johnson, the Attorney-General, tc a 



510 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

judgeship. It had been arranged before, that whenever the 
General Election came, Mr. O'Brien, as a Mallow man, should 
appeal to the town to throw off its servitude to Whiggery and 
join the rest of the country in the new demand for the resto- 
ration of Irish rights. The opportunity for the appeal had 
come sooner than anybody had anticipated. The prosecution 
of O'Brien by the Government lent a singular opportuneness 
to the struggle, and a still further element of significance was 
added to the contest by the Government sending down Mr. 
Naish, their new Attorney-General, as his opponent. Mallow, 
in some respects, has a, history similar to that of Athlone, 
Sligo, and some other small constituencies of Ireland. During 
the dread interregnum between the betrayal of Keogh and the 
rise of Butt, it had followed the example of the other small 
constituencies in sending into Parliament the worthless repre- 
sentatives of Whiggery or Tories. The representatives of 
Mallow, like the representatives of Galway and Athlone, and 
of Sligo and Carlow, bought that they might sell. It had, 
accordingly, been a favourite ground for the race of Rabagas, 
in the period when a place in Parliament was the only 
avenue to legal promotion, and brought to the ease and 
emolument of the judicial bench the aspiring lawyers who 
had been willing to pay largely for the privilege of repre- 
senting the place. Its most noticeable representative of 
this type was Mr. — afterwards Sir Edward — Sullivan, the 
Lord Chancellor of Ireland. He was a Mallow man, but 
it was not his claim upon it or his politics that had so 
largely helped to gain him the position as the lavish bribes 
he bestowed from his own pocket, like nearly every other 
member of the judicial bench, upon the corrupt members of 
the constituency, and the still larger bribes he was able to 
bestow in the shape of official appointments. The contest 
for Mallow, under circumstances like these, attracted an im- 
mense amount of attention, and all Ireland looked to the 
result with feverish eagerness. Mr. O'Brien was assisted by 
some of the most prominent members of his party, and there 
was considerable hope that the contest might end in a victory. 
But the reputation of Mallow had been so bad for so many 
years that there were doubts mixed with hope, and the utmost 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 511 

expectation was that Mr. O'Brien would be returned by a small 
majority. The full significance of the change that had come 
over all Ireland was shown when the result was announced, 
and it was found that O'Brien had been returned by a majo- 
rity of 72 — 161 to 89. 

The Irish members were prepared to bring before Par- 
liament the shameless jury-packing and the other features 
of the Coercion regime when the Session of 1883 opened. 
But meantime there had come to the Lord-Lieutenant aid 
from an unexpected quarter. On January 21 a number of 
men were arrested on a charge of being concerned in the 
murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke, and 
some days after the trial opened the whole world was startled 
by the appearance of James Carey, the chief of the gang, in 
the witness-box. The circumstances under which the Govern- 
ment consented to allow this — the leading and the worst spirit 
of the whole conspiracy to escape punishment — will remain 
unknown until memoirs have begun to tell another generation 
of the hidden springs of action in the present generation. It 
is certain, however, that the acceptance of Carey's testimony 
was not agreed to till after several consultations ; and if 
rumour be trustworthy, the chief person in insisting on calling 
Carey from the dock to the witness-table was Sir William 
Harcourt. His hope, of course, was that Carey would have 
been able to give evidence which might implicate the Land 
League in the atrocious doings of the Invincible Society, and 
thereby bring home murder to Mr. Parnell and the other 
leaders of the Irish party. There is a saying attributed to the 
Home Secretary which roughly sums up his expectation of 
the effect upon the Irish party of the evidence of Carey. 
' This,' he is reported to have said, ' will take the starch out 
of the boys.' 

Other speakers, especially of the Ministerial party, did 
not scruple to say outright what Sir William Harcourt had 
thus put in the desJiabille of private conversation, and more 
than suggested that while it was Joe Brady that used the 
knife, the Irish members were the men who had supplied 
the funds. 

Under the influence of speeches like this public passion 



512 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

in England once more became fiercely aroused, and the 
majority of the English people were firmly convinced, in all 
probability, that before many days Mr. Parnell would take his 
place beside the murderers of Lord Frederick Cavendish and 
Mr. Burke. Irish members are sometimes accused of being 
venomous, violent, and unscrupulous in their attacks upon 
their political opponents. Their speeches in this respect were 
once compared by Mr. Chamberlain to the use of explosive 
bullets in civilised warfare. This charge is conveniently but 
characteristically forgetful of the things Irish members have 
had to bear from the tongues of their English opponents and 
the pens of English journalists. 

There was one man who was again dragged from the 
depths to the surface by the new revelations as to the state 
of Ireland. By the same strange logic which had made the 
hideous outcome of Mr. Forster's policy in the assassinations 
its defence and not its most eloquent condemnation, the reve- 
lations of the trials became again, amid the fury of English 
passion, to be the vindication of his wisdom. After his fashion 
he resolved to take full advantage of the tide of passion that 
was running so high. Mr. Gorst proposed : — 

And we venture to express our earnest hope that the policy which 
has produced these results will be maintained, and that no further 
attempts will be made to purchase the support of persons disaffected 
to Her Majesty's rule by concessions to lawless agitation ; and that 
the existence of dangerous secret societies in Dublin, and other parts 
of the country, will continue to be met by unremitting energy and 
vigilance on the part of the Executive. 1 

On February 22, 1883, Mr. Forster took part in this 
debate, and at once resolved to make it the occasion of 
having it out with his old and triumphant enemy. He had 
carefully prepared himself for the occasion. His notes were 
voluminous ; every sentence in his long indictment had been 
carefully weighed ; the speech was full of the adroit innuendo 
and the deeply laid though apparently casual asides of 
which the member for Bradford is a master. The attack 
on Mr. Parnell was made the more palatable to the House 

1 Hansard, vol. cclxxvi. p. 414. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 513 

by its being dexterously sandwiched between attacks on 
Mr. Forster's former colleagues, against whom at this moment 
the tide ran almost as high as against Mr. Parnell himself. 

The indictment was a great, an immense parliamentary 
success. The House, swept by its invective, was lashed into 
fury, and there were loud cries for Mr. Parnell's immediate 
rise. This demand is a sufficient proof of the fairness of 
the temper in the House. Mr. Forster had delivered a speech 
which he had prepared for weeks ; the speech had been 
extended into the dinner hour ; and it was this famished 
and impatient assembly that Mr. Parnell was expected to 
address with an impromptu reply to a most elaborately pre- 
pared attack. Mr. Parnell, of course, declined to be bullied 
into premature speech ; and, indeed, contemptuous of this as 
he is of every attack, he for some time was doubtful whether 
he should take the trouble of replying at all. The English 
press, meantime, was in exultant delight. ' Mr. Forster's 
stern interrogatories,' said the ' Times,' ' fell on Mr. Parnell 
like the lash of a whip on a man's face.' 

It is worth pausing for a moment here to say that the 
whole cause of the tempest against Mr. Parnell and the Land 
League, which raged for weeks in England and threatened 
■the liberty if not the life of some of the Irish leaders, was the 
result of a couple of sentences of an informer. The following 
are the sentences referred to. Carey is being examined by 
the Crown prosecutor. 

What was the opinion amongst some of them as to where the 
money came from ? — There were different ideas. Some said it came 
from America i I said I did not believe that it came from America. 

Where did you say you believed it came from ? — I said I did not 
think from America. I think I expressed myself, but I know between 
the whole of us it was repeatedly said, ' Perhaps they are getting it 
from the Land League.' 1 

From this it will be seen that all Carey ventured to say 
was that he or some other members of his gang had a sus- 
picion that the money came from the Land League. The 
.subject was never recurred to in his evidence, and of course, it 

1 United Ireland, Feb. 24, 1SS3. 



514 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

was never recurred to, for the reason that the Crown authorities 
knew that a connection between the Land League and the 
' Invincibles ' could not be established. This is one of the many- 
indications of how terrible a thing it is that the reputation and 
fortunes of an Irish cause should be at the mercy of a national 
opinion in England, which is so inevitably liable to go wrong 
and to believe the worst and the weakest evidence. Attention 
would have been more fitly directed to another portion of 
the evidence of Carey which spoke in trumpet tones against 
Mr. Forster. The ' Invincibles ' were the same dread brood 
that despotism always begets, were as much the children 
of Mr. Forster's regime as the Nihilists are of the autocracy 
of Russia, and Carey himself was the strongest witness in 
proof of this. 

James Carey cross-examined by Mr. Walsh — 

When you became a member of the Order of Invincibles was it for 
the object of serving your country that you joined ? — Well, yes. 

And at that time when you joined with the object of serving your 
country, in what state was Ireland ? — In a very bad state. 

A famine, I think, was just passing over her? — Yes. 

The Coercion Bill was in force, and the popular leaders were in 
prison ? — Yes. 

And was it because you despaired of any constitutional means of 
serving Ireland that you joined the Society of Invincibles ? — I believe 
so. 1 

It was, of course, assumed that Mr. Parnell would go 
down under this flood of hatred and calumny. The only 
effect in Ireland was to attract to him the more passionate 
affection of his people. The idea had long been familiar to 
the minds of his admirers that he should be relieved from 
some of the pecuniary embarrassments which he inherited 
and which he had himself largely increased by his generosity 
to his tenants both during and before the Land League 
agitation. The attack of Mr. Forster brought this idea to 
practical shape, and the Parnell Tribute was started with a 
letter from Archbishop Croke. One thing only was wanted 
to its success ; that was another attack. This came as a 
result of the sinister counsels of a renegade Nationalist at the 

1 United Ireland, Feb. 24, 1883. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 515 

Vatican. The tribute went on apace, and when it was closed 
it had reached close upon the handsome amount of 40,000/. 

In other ways, too, Ireland was showing that she was 
not to be turned back from the man and the principles to 
which she had now definitely committed herself. One "of the 
worst acts of the White Terror was the imprisonment of 
Mr. Harrington. He had, in a speech at Westmeath, en- 
deavoured to rouse the farmers to a sense of their duty to 
their labourers. The farmers, unfortunately, required some 
stimulus in this direction. Serfs themselves, who had been 
plundered for generations, and had thus been in most cases 
reduced to abject poverty, they naturally treated those under 
them with want of consideration ; and the labourers of Ire- 
land remain still the worst-housed, worst-dressed, and worst- 
fed population in any Christian country. At the same time, 
deprived of education, the labourers might be led astray into 
seeking reform through violence ; and the labourer, as a land 
agent once triumphantly informed Mr. Healy, can be more 
dangerous to the farmer than ever the farmer can be to the 
landlord. The farmer requires a blunderbuss ; the labourer 
requires only a match. 

These were the considerations which will occur to any- 
body who knows anything of the Irish land problem. They 
were certainly the considerations present to the mind of Mr. 
Harrington. The words he was accused of employing were : 
1 Now I ask the tenant-farmers to come forward generously 
and give the labourers a fair day's wages for a fair day's 
work. If not, the agitation which has been carried on in 
their behalf will be turned against them if they do not come 
forward and assist the labourers here in their hour of need.' 

These words the authorities of Dublin Castle professed 
to regard as intended and calculated to intimidate the farmers 
of Westmeath. Mr. Harrington was sent before two of the 
magistrates who had been specially appointed to carry out 
the work of the authorities under the Crimes Act. It is one 
of the jokes of this period that the appointment of these 
magistrates was held up as a concession to popular feeling ; 
and that such magistrates, being independent of the Adminis- 
tration, would hold the scales evenly between the Crown and 



516 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the subject. Mr. Trevelyan — the saddest instance in these 
days of the shameless apostasy from lifelong principles which 
Irish office can produce in an English statesman — actually 
was not ashamed to bring this argument forward in defending 
the action of the Administration in the case of Mr. Harrington. 
The magistrates were, as has already been pointed out, 
servants of the Crown, appointed by the Crown, continued 
or dismissed from office by the Crown, promoted to higher 
or reduced to lower positions and emoluments by the Crown, 
and as much, therefore, independent judicial tribunals as the 
provincial magistrate of a Turkish administration. Before 
two of such magistrates Mr. Harrington had not, of course, 
the least chance of acquittal. 1 Then an appeal was allowed 

1 There was an amusing but instructive instance of the manner in which 
evidence used to be doctored in trials under the Crimes Act. The main witness 
against Mr. Harrington was Acting-Constable Mathews, who professed to have 
taken a shorthand note of Mr. Harrington's speech. It was on the report of 
Acting-Constable Mathews that the prosecution was undertaken. 

Mr. Harrington, to witness : Now, on your oath are these the bona fide 
notes that you took on the platform while I was speaking ?— No. ... I wrote 
the transcripts from my notes and from memory. 

Did you alter your notes after the meeting ? — I did. ... In writing my notes 
on the next day I called my memory into requisition. My memory is a particu- 
larly clear one. 

Notwithstanding the fact that with your four years' shorthand writing you 
cannot write the letter L ? — Yes, but I can write the letter L. . . . I could 
make it on the last day. » 

Mr. Harrington asked the Court: Did he make the proper character L on 
the last day ? 

Chairman : We believe it is within our recollection that he did not. . . . 

Mr. Harrington, to witness : In the original notes you took on the plat- 
form did you write all the words of my speech ? — No, I did not. I used my 
memory in suppressing some words you used. I used my memory also in sup- 
pressing some of the sentences used by you. I did not alter my notes. ... I 
altered them. — {Hoiv the Crimes Act is Administered, pp. 55—6.) 

Mathews was asked to read his notes, and was given four hours to study them. 
On the following day this is what occurred : Acting- Constable Mathews was 
afterwards put into the witness-box and asked to read the whole of Mr. Harring- 
ton's speech from his original notes of the speech taken on the platform. He 
was obliged to confess that he was utterly unable to read them. He alleged that 
the book was soiled and that he could not read his notes in consequence. The 
shorthand was easily obliterated. 

The Bench examined the note-book at the defendant's request, and expressed 
their opinion that the book was clean and that there was no reason why he should 
not be able to read it. — (Extract of report from Daily Express Dublin Conserva- 
tive organ), Jan. II, 1S83, quoted in How the Crimes Act is Administered, p. 59. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 517 

to the County Court Judge. Here again Mr. Harrington 
was before what the Chief Secretary did not scruple to call 
an independent judicial tribunal. The County Court Judge 
was Mr. J. Chute Neligan. Mr. Neligan is a Kerry land- 
lord ; Mr. Harrington is the proprietor of the ' Kerry Sen- 
tinel,' which has waged fierce war upon the oppression of 
the landlords of the County Kerry ; and it will be understood 
under the circumstances how fair a trial Mr. Harrington was 
likely to have. The conviction was confirmed, and Mr. 
Harrington was sentenced to two months' imprisonment. It 
was a consequence of this sentence that he should be subjected 
to the punishment of the plank-bed for a month, and under- 
go all the other hardships that are meted out to the worst 
criminals. This sentence, severe enough, was aggravated by 
the determination of the prison authorities to render his stay 
in prison as odious as possible. He was asked to perform 
a duty the description of which is not permissible ; some of 
the landlords of the county could see their hated and fallen 
foe thus menially and disgustingly employed from the window 
of the governor's house, and Mr. Harrington refused to give 
his enemies the spectacle of his degradation. In consequence 
he was condemned by the governor to the loss of the two 
hours' recreation he was allowed by the prison rules, and for 
six days he had to remain within his cell without even once 
tasting a breath of fresh air or enjoying a moment's exercise. 
It was while he was thus in the solitude of his cell that he 
received news which was his vindication and the everlasting - 
shame of Lord Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan and all the other 
persons responsible for his imprisonment. A vacancy had 
been made in the representation of Co. Westmeath by the retire- 
ment of Mr. Gill. Mullingar — the town in which Mr. Har- 
rington was imprisoned — is the capital town of Co. Westmeath, 
and here the nomination of candidates had to take place. The 
constituency, up to the passage of the Franchise Act, consisted 
exclusively, or almost exclusively, of farmers ; probably there 
was not a single labourer on the whole electoral roll. In 
other words, the constituency consisted exclusively of the 
class whom Mr. Harrington was convicted of having intimi- 
dated, and excluded everyone of the class in whose interest 



5i8 . THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

he was accused of having employed intimidation. Yet it 
came to pass that no less than three nomination papers were 
sent in signed by farmers, and Mr. Harrington's popularity 
was so great that nobody even attempted to oppose him. It 
had been arranged that a signal from the railway embank- 
ment, from which the cell of Mr. Harrington was visible, 
should announce the result of the election ; and the signal 
seen by Mr. Harrington in his cell told him that, though 
humiliated and tortured by the British power, he had been 
freely given by his own people the highest honour it was in 
their power to bestow. 

But the Government were not yet done with Mr. Harring- 
ton. He had to serve out the full term of imprisonment for 
a crime of which he had thus been triumphantly acquitted ; 
and soon after the issue of a ridiculous placard, that bore the 
indications of a practical joke in its every line, was used as a 
pretext for seizing his newspaper, turning his printing-office 
inside out, and later his brother was sentenced to six months' 
imprisonment. It is paying a very bad compliment to Lord 
Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan not to assume that they knew 
the utter groundlessness of the charge against Mr. Harring- 
ton's brother quite as well as Mr. Harrington himself. There 
are many darker and more heinous crimes to be laid to the 
charge of the administration of Lord Spencer and Mr. 
Trexelyan, but their action towards Mr. Harrington and 
his brother marked, perhaps, the lowest depth of mean 
malignity. 

A more important victory than even that in Westmeath 
soon came. The promotion of Mr. Givan to a Government 
situation left a vacancy in the county of Monaghan. It was 
at once resolved that the seat should be contested by Mr. 
Healy, whose great services in amending the Land Act, and 
especially in obtaining the clause called after his name, 
marked him out as the strongest candidate for such a 
contest. The attempt to gain a seat in one of the Ulster 
constituencies was regarded as insane impudence. The 
Whigs demanded that, though representative of a miserable 
minority of the popular party, they should be allowed their 
traditional place as the officers of the army of which the 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 519 

rank and file were almost entirely composed of Nationalists. 1 
These impudent pretensions were for once rejected, and the 
Nationalists determined to win or lose with their own man. 
The Tories, on their side, felt the full importance of the 
contest, and put forward one of their ablest representatives 
in Mr. John Monroe, an eminent Queen's Counsel. The 
three parties were thus, represented : the Nationalists by Mr. 
Healy, the Liberals by Mr. Pringle, and the Conservatives by 
Mr. Monroe. The contest was fought with considerable spirit 
on all sides, and in the end the National candidate won. 
The Liberal candidate exposed the emptiness of the pre- 
tensions on which his party had held the monopoly of 
political power for so long. Mr. Pringle had but 274 votes ; 
Mr. Monroe received 2,011 votes; Mr. Healy, with 2,376 
votes, had a clear majority over the candidates of the two 
parties combined. A few weeks afterwards Whiggery re- 
ceived an even more crushing blow. For the vacancy made 
by Mr. Healy there came forward The O'Conor Don and 
Mr. W. H. K. Redmond. Mr. Redmond was a young man, 
scarcely of legal age at the time of the contest, and he was 
absent in Australia. The O'Conor Don, on the other hand, 
was a trained and mature politician ; and, though he had 
joined the ranks of his country's enemies, came from an old 
Irish stock. But in the struggle he was beaten ignominiously. 
The numbers were: Redmond, 307 ; O'Conor Don, 126 ; and 
it was only the intervention of the popular leaders that saved 
the defeated Whig from the vengeance of the people, ex- 
asperated at the implied insult in the effort to seduce their 
ancient town from the rest of the country in the struggle for 
the restoration of Irish liberties. 

In the autumn of this year an attempt was made from 
another of the anti-National forces to arrest the tide of 
National victory. 

The province of Ulster has, with a characteristic ignorance 
of Irish affairs, been always regarded by the English public 

1 Ulster (said the Northern Whig) is not National and cannot be made 
National. . . . The loyal Ulster electors, Protestant and Catholic, Liberal and 
Conservative, have only to come to an understanding to divide the rep re entation. 
Under such an arrangement not one Nationalist candidate could be returned for 
Ulster.— (Quoted in Pall Mall Gazette, June 27, 1SS3.) 



520 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

as forming a solid mass unanimously in favour of the per- 
petuation of English domination and against the restoration 
of Irish liberties. This absurd misrepresentation of the real 
state of Ulster obtained even among a portion of the Irish 
public. To the southern Nationalist the north was chiefly 
known as the home of the most rabid religious and political 
intolerance perhaps in the whole Christian world ; it was 
designated by the comprehensive title of the ' Black North.' 
But it was not always so. In the days of 1798 the most 
stubborn resistance to the success of the English forces was 
made in Ulster. It was Ulster Presbyterians who, banished 
from Ireland by laws that worked oppression without regard 
to religion, gave to the American Revolution its most stead- 
fast counsellors and some of its best generals and bravest 
soldiers. It was among Ulster Presbyterians that the 
foundation was laid of the association known as the United 
Irishmen, who formed, up to the days of Fenianism, the most 
formidable conspiracy against English rule. In more modern 
times Ulster Presbyterians formed one of the strongest ele- 
ments of the Tenant Right party. It is true that, in the course 
of time, the Presbyterians forgot the more robust faith of 
their ancestors, were in some instances carried away by the 
tide of religious bigotry, and in a large degree lapsed to the 
ignoble compromise of Whiggery ; but at all times in the 
history of Ulster the Catholics formed nearly a half of the 
entire population. These Catholics were Nationalists to a 
man ; and, living in the midst of a population which the law 
permitted to insult, to persecute, and often to murder them 
with perfect impunity, they held to their faith with a fervour 
unknown in the almost exclusively Catholic parts of the 
country. But the landlords belonged to the anti-Nationalist 
party ; the boards were all manned by members of the anti- 
Nationalist party ; the occupants of the Bench were gathered 
from the ranks of an organisation sworn to persecution and 
hatred of the Catholics ; and, finally, under a restricted 
franchise, the parliamentary representatives were taken ex- 
clusively from the two English parties. Under these 
circumstances the National party in Ulster still remained 
inarticulate, and Ulster continued to present to the outside 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 521 

world a solid front of fierce antagonism to everything Irish 
and National. 

The Land League did much to make this terra incognita 
known to the rest of Ireland and to the world generally. The 
Land League gathered to its ranks all the Nationalists, and 
obtained, if not adhesion, at least toleration ; National repre- 
sentatives spoke from Ulster platforms to audiences as large 
and more enthusiastic than in any other part of Ireland ; 
and practically the masses of the people there were as solidly 
on the side of the League as in any other part of the 
country. After the Monaghan election the Ulster Nationalists 
decided that they should hold meetings in different parts of 
the country for the purpose of preparing for the general 
election by establishing registration associations. The object 
was unquestionably legitimate and even praiseworthy. It 
was in the highest sense legal, and these meetings were 
organised and upheld by something like 48 per cent, of the 
population generally in Ulster, and in some of the counties 
where the meetings were to be held, by 70 per cent, of the 
population. 

The meetings, which were protested against by Orange- 
men as an invasion, were summoned, among other places, for 
the county of Cavan, and Cavan, both in the election of 1880 
and in the last election, returned two National representatives ;; 
in Monaghan, and Monaghan is now represented by two> 
National members ; in Tyrone, and three out of four seats in 
Tyrone are represented by Nationalists ; in Fermanagh, and the 
two seats in Fermanagh are represented by two Nationalists ; 
in Newry, and the. return of a Nationalist in Newry was not 
even opposed. The statistics of population show with equal 
clearness the impudence of the Orange claim. In Strabane, 
where a meeting was called, out of the total population of 
4,196, 2,720 are Catholics, and there are only 693 of the 
Episcopalian Protestants, from whom Orangeism is largely 
recruited, and 685 Presbyterians. Out of the entire popu- 
lation of 5,231 in Pomeroy, 3,537 are Catholics, 734 Episco- 
palian Protestants, and 892 Presbyterians. Out of the entire 
population of Castle Derg, 3,748 are Catholics, 940 Episco- 
palian Protestants, and 505 Presbyterians. And, finally, out 



522 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

of the entire population of 6,069 in Rosslea, where there was 
a most violent attempt to break up the Nationalist meeting, 
4,394 are Catholics, 1,357 Protestant Episcopalians, and 258 
Presbyterians. 1 

The landlords resolved to make a last desperate effort 
for the preservation of their power, and organised a move- 
ment perhaps as wicked and as shameful as any known to 
the modern history of Ireland. They openly proclaimed 
that they would put down, by force of arms if necessary, 
these meetings of their fellow-citizens. They organised 
bodies which had all the appurtenances as well as the spirit 
of armies. Wherever a Nationalist meeting was arranged 
they organised a counter-demonstration. Their followers 
went to these demonstrations as heavily armed as if they 
were marching to the field of battle, and the orators of the 
day made speeches openly inciting to wholesale murder. 

' With no uncertain sound,' said an Orange placard pub- 
lished in Omagh, ' compel the rebel conspirators to return to 
their haunts in the south and west, and under a guard of 
military and police, as in Dungannon on Thursday.' 2 ' It was 
a great pity,' said Lord Rossmore, ' that the so-called Govern- 
ment of England stopped loyal men from assembling to 
uphold their institutions here, and had sent down a handful 
of soldiers whom they could eat up in a second or two if 
they thought fit.' 3 ' The Orangemen,' said Captain Barton, 
* if they liked could be the Government themselves. . . . 
He only wished they were allowed, and they could soon 
drive the rebels, like Parnell and his followers, out of their 
sight.' 4 

Major Saunderson wondered ' why those rebels abused 
the police and soldiers ; only for them where would they 
have been in Dungannon ? They would have been in the 
nearest river (cheers), and at Omagh and Aughnacloy they 
would have been in the same place.' 5 

The Rev. Mr. Jagoe ' would conclude by telling them 
what John Dillon, another rebel, said in a speech in the 
House of Commons, and which he took from a report in the 

1 Loyalty plus Murder, p. 10. By Mr. T. M. Healy, M.P. 2 lb, p. 7. 

3 lb. p. 18. 4 lb. p. 22. 5 //'. p. 23. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 523 

*' Freeman's Journal," and which he had in his pocket — 
" That he would advise the people to shoot down every 
Protestant in Ireland." , (Groans and cries of " We'll shoot 
them.") ' l 

1 Theirs was no aggressive party,' exclaimed Mr. Murray 
Ker, D.L. . . . ' Let there be no revolver practice.' (Cheers.) 
* His advice to them about revolvers was, never use a revolver 
except they were firing at someone.' (Laughter and cheers.) 2 

1 If the Government/ said Lord Claud Hamilton, ' fail to 
prevent Mr. Parnell and Co. from making inroads into 
Ulster ... if they do not prevent those hordes of ruffians 
from invading us, we will take the law into our own hands, 
and we ourselves will.' 3 ' Keep the cartridge in the rifle,' 
said Colonel King-Harman at Rathmines. 4 ' Keep a firm 
grip on your sticks/ said Mr. Archdale at Dromore. 5 The 
' Daily Express/ the organ of law and order and of the land- 
lords, whose editor is the well-known Dr. Patton, Dublin 
•correspondent of the ' Times/ filled its columns with direct 
incitements to murder which would have landed, and justly 
landed, a Nationalist editor in penal servitude. 

This new attempt (it wrote of the Nationalist meetings in Ulster) 
. . . will be repelled, and the hireling disturbers of the peace of 
Ulster hurled back ignominiously from the frontier by the loyal men 
of Fermanagh. . , . They have at length aroused a spirit in the north 
which will no longer submit to insult. The alarm is sounded, and 
the determination of the Loyalists of the country expressed in another 
■column. It is a warning which they will do well to respect. Let 
them call it a threat if they choose. There it is to be read and 
pondered. It is no time to quibble about words. The meaning is 
■clear and plain, and the men to whom it is addressed do not shrink 
from the avowal of their final determination. They plainly tell the 
disturbers of the peace . . . that they are determined to take effectual 
measures to put a stop to every attempt to disseminate pernicious 
doctrines in their midst. 6 

Commenting on the death of an unfortunate creature 
named Giffen, who was killed by the police at Dromore, the 
same organ wrote : — 

1 Loyalty plus Murder, p. 23. 2 lb. p. 41. 3 lb. p. 42. 

4 lb. title-page. s lb. 6 lb. pp. 32, 



oo- 



524 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

As it was, the fact that a couple of men on the Loyalist side 
were wounded with lances or bayonets is most unlucky. The men 
may have misbehaved, they may have deserved what they got, but it 
is very painful to the feelings of all people to find the Queen's troops 
charging and cutting down even rioters who are urged on to riot by 
loyalty. 1 

Meantime everybody was naturally asking, What were the 
executive doing ? The same man who had sent peasants to 
the scaffold after hurried, partial trials, permitted the Lord- 
Lieutenants, deputy lieutenants, and magistracy of Ulster to 
proclaim these incitements and to make these preparations 
for wholesale murder. The authorities who had endeavoured 
to consign Mr. O'Brien to a prison for fair comments on public 
trials allowed Orange journals to preach with absolute im- 
punity the gospel of assassination. To add to the outrage 
of the occasion, a member of the Cabinet, boastful of his 
more robust Radicalism, and claimed as an ardent friend of 
Ireland, insulted and mocked the people of the country by 
describing the impunity of these gross encouragements to 
the shedding of blood on one side, and this cruel and relent- 
less persecution of the National majority on the other, as the 
policy of ' an even keek' Another Cabinet minister, who had 
been one of the most violent in his denunciations of Mr. 
Parnell on the ground of his exploiting crime as a political 
weapon, was not ashamed to speak in language of exultation 
at these outbursts of ferocious and sanguinary bigotry, and 
showed a perfect readiness to exploit the bludgeons and the 
revolvers of Orangemen and their lawless and murderous pro- 
ceedings as an argument in favour of his own political princi- 
ples. Lord Hartington's comment on Sir Stafford Northcote's 
tour was that it had shown how much loyalty to England 
there was in Ireland ; and this was a gratification. 

This is one of the instances of that true appreciation of 
Irish affairs which makes Irishmen nowadays so confident 
in the goodwill and the pledges of English Liberals. But 
by the Irish public the situation was perfectly understood. 
Lord Spencer, professing to hold the scales of justice, and to 
govern evenly between the contending factions in Ireland, 

1 Loyal' y plus Murder, p. 53. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 5-5 

thus lent all the force and encouragement he dared to the 
English faction. In fact he adopted what most people thought 
the discredited and abandoned principles of an earlier and 
a more sanguinary generation. He divided in the hope of 
conquering ; and Mr. Trevelyan, as the result of the direct 
encouragement which he and his superior had given to these 
riotous, illegal, and murderous proceedings, was able to draw 
the agreeable moral that English domination was required in 
order to keep Irish factions from each other's throats, and 
that National government in Ireland would necessarily result 
in internecine and destructive quarrels. 

The approach of the opening of Parliament compelled 
Lord Spencer to take action, and the result of his awakened 
energies was the severest condemnation of his previous in- 
action. Police shorthand writers were sent to some of the 
Orange, as previously they had been sent to all of the 
Nationalist meetings, and the peers and the deputy lieutenants 
and the magistrates at once abandoned the tone of murderous 
incitement. A body of police was ordered to prevent the 
breaking up of a meeting by Orange rowdies, and the rowdies, 
of course, flew pell-mell before the first charge of the police. 
There never was a movement so blustering and so cruel that 
vanished with such rapidity before the first show of deter- 
mination on the part of the Government. Under a National 
government such a movement would be almost unimaginable. 
It required the stimulation of foreign intervention to permit 
or to create it ; and it was the wicked action of himself and 
his colleagues in producing divisions that, without him and 
them, would not have existed, that Mr. Trevelyan was not 
ashamed to adduce as an argument in favour of English rule. 1 

1 It is well to quote Mr. Trevel) an's own description of the state of things 
which lie and Lord Spencer permitted to exist in Ireland ; they are the strongest 
condemnation of the policy of the Irish Government at this crisis. This is his 
description of the character and purpose of the Orange counter-demonstrations : 
' Unfortunately, however, the counter-demonstrations of the Orangemen were, to 
a great extent, demonstrations of bodies of armed men. At their last meeting 
at Dromore sackfitls of revolvers were left behind close to the place of meeting. The 
reason that they were so left was that a shrewd and energetic officer who was 
present was seen to search the Orangemen as they came along. The Orange 
meetings, therefore, were bodies of armed men, many of whom came prepared 
to use their arms ; some of them prepared to make a murderous attack upon the 



526 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

This was the last effort of ascendency in Ireland. In the 
next session of Parliament the Irish masses were offered for 
the first time in all their history an opportunity of being truly 
represented in an Imperial parliament. To the acquisition of 
their rights by their countrymen the Irish Tory party offered 
a frantic resistance, but the Irish question had by this time 
got beyond the stage at which it could any longer be trifled 
with or avoided. Though possibly in their hearts the majority 
of English Liberals disliked as heartily as English or Irish 
Tories the prospect of the voice of Ireland being heard at 
Westminster, English statesmen saw that the time had passed 
for refusing to Irish citizens an exact equality of rights with 
those of their fellow-citizens in Great Britain. Even the 
Tories appreciated the situation sufficiently to be divided upon 
it. Sir Stafford Northcote and several other leaders of the 
party refused to join in the demand for excluding Ireland, and 
although the voices against Irish rights had been loud during 
the recess, the anti-Irish forces scattered in shameful and 
disastrous retreat when the moment for conflict came. Mr. 
Chaplin proposed an amendment the object of which was 
to exclude Ireland from the franchise. He was able to quote 
in favour of his proposition the words of the Marquis of 
Hartington — not more than twelve months old — which de- 
scribed this very measure — the measure which the Liberal 
Government, with the Marquis of Hartington as one of its 
members, were now bringing in — as an act little short of mad- 
ness. Mr. Chaplin was able to point out, without any contra- 

Nationalists.' ('No! No!') 'So far as the Government knew, it was not 
the custom of the Nationalists to go armed to their meetings until the bad ex- 
ample was set by the Orangemen.' — (Hansard', vol. eclxxxiv. p. 383.) And here 
is his description of the state to which the Orange firebrands had brought Ulster : 
' In spite of the fact that Ulster was full of armed men, who were excited to an 
extreme degree by the violent speeches of their leaders ; that every hand 
brandished a cudgel ; that tens of thousands of revolvers were being carried 
about ; and that the leaders of the men were telling them to take a firm grip of 
their sticks, and not to fire their pistols except when they were certain of hitting 
somebody, the winter had so far passed with no great or striking disaster.' — {lb. 
p. 384.) Mr. Trevelyan's inference from the state of things thus described was 
that he and Lord Spencer were required to stand between Ireland and civil war 
{Times, Dec. 7, 1883). The more reasonable inference is that a Government that 
could allow such a state of things to continue was not the obstacle to civil war, 
but the cause and stimulus of civil war. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 527 

diction, that the inevitable result of the reduction of the fran- 
chise would be to send into Parliament a larger proportion of 
Nationalist representatives. But these arguments fell, as he 
knew, upon deaf ears ; and after the House had listened for 
nearly half an hour to his speech — a speech delivered with ap- 
parent conviction and fervour — they were suddenly astonished 
to hear him say : ' He had only to consider the course which 
on this occasion he should pursue.' l 

The truth at once flashed upon the assembly. The mover 
of the amendment was afraid to put it to the test of the 
division lobby, was about to flee from his own proposal and 
to resume his seat without proposing his motion. But not 
even yet was Irish Toryism satisfied. Mr. Brodrick, who, 
though sitting for an English constituency, is the son of an 
Irish landlord, rushed in where English Tories feared to 
tread, proposed a similar amendment, was backed again by 
all the forces of the Irish landlord party, and, having foolishly 
given a pledge at the beginning of his speech, that he would go 
to a division, was compelled to test the opinion of the House. 
The result was that about a hundred members of his own party 
left the House, that several of its most prominent members 
were found in the same lobby with the Irish National members, 
and that the attempt to deprive Ireland of her rights was 
rejected by 332 to 137 — probably the largest majority ever 
recorded in favour of an extension of popular liberties. 

The next attack upon the rights of Ireland was upon the 
question as to whether she should retain her 103 seats, and 
upon this point the Irish Tories found in the ranks of the 
Liberal party allies of a hostility to Ireland as malignant and 
as relentless as their own. Mr. Forster had not forgiven the 
country that had destroyed his career, and, in spite of all the 
bitter memories associated with his connection with that 
country, joined in the attack upon her rights with indecent 
acerbity. Forgetting the number of years during which the 
representation of Ireland in Parliament was vastly inferior to 
her just numerical claims, Mr. Forster brought forward the 
reduction in her population — a reduction caused by English 
laws and English bayonets — as a reason why she should be 

1 Hansard, vol. ecliii. p. 10S0. 



528 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

less potent in the future for protecting her rights against the 
more powerful nation. He set down the number of repre- 
sentatives to which Ireland was entitled as eighty-one,' In this 
crusade against Ireland Mr. Forster found a willing ally in 
Mr. Goschen. It is one of the saddest signs of the times that 
a man like this, who has grown wealthy by pandering to the 
extravagance and vices of an Eastern despot, who has amassed 
his riches through the torture and impoverishment of the 
Egyptian people, should be tolerated in an assembly sup- 
posed to consist of honourable men, and as a member of a 
party which claims to fight for freedom and for justice. Mr. 
Goschen was naturally hostile to the rights of Ireland. When 
the second reading of the Franchise Bill was proposed, Mr. 
Goschen asked whether the number of Irish scats was to be 
reduced, and emphatically declared that if no guarantee were 
given by the Ministry on this point he would be compelled 
to vote against the measure. Amid a chilling silence, which 
he himself noticed and utilised, he asked whether the reten- 
tion of all her seats by Ireland was a principle by which the 
Government were prepared to stand or fall ; and at that 
moment, when there was no reply beyond a few stray cheers 
from the Radicals below the gangway, he looked as if he were 
indeed destined to triumph over Ireland. But neither the 
Irish landlords, nor Mr. Forster, nor Mr. Goschen could pre- 
vail against the forces which had now been arrayed on the 
side of Ireland, and amid the practically universal assent of 
the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone announced, on intro- 
ducing the Redistribution Bill, that Ireland was to retain the 
full measure of her seats. In the course of the debates 
upon this Bill the Irish landlord party made several attempts 
against this part of the scheme, but these were rejected by 
overwhelming majorities, and thus the last obstacle was re- 
moved towards Ireland finding, in the Imperial Parliament, a 
body of representatives truly expressing the views of her 
people. In Ireland itself, meantime, other victories had fol- 
lowed. The nominal Home Rulers, at the time of their seces- 
sion, were loaded with the praises of English ministers, and 
were described by the English press as the real representatives 

1 Tunes, March I, 1SS4. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 529 

of Irish feeling, and upright, outspoken, and reasonable men. 
It is possible that some of the people who spoke and wrote 
in this way believed what they said, but the gentlemen 
themselves soon gave convincing testimony of what they 
meant by their separation from the ranks of the Parnellite 
party. They belonged, as everybody in Ireland knew, and 
the people of England were taught to ignore, to the class of 
office-seekers, the analysis of whose mischievous influence 
forms so large a portion of this volume. In due time they 
sought for the rewards of their treason ; the result in every 
case was their replacement by men pledged to the National 
principles, to the leadership of Mr. Parnell, and to entire 
co-operation with- the Irish party. Mr. O'Shaughnessy, pro- 
moted to the Registrarship of Petty Sessions Clerks, was 
succeeded by Mr. MacMahon. Mr. P. J. Smyth, made Secre- 
tary of the Loan Fund, was succeeded by Mr. John O'Connor. 
Two other constituencies, whose names occur in the shameful 
and painful record of the days when Rabagas was supreme, 
joined as heartily as the other constituencies of the country 
in returning National representatives. Mr. Kenny, opposed 
by a Conservative in Ennis, a town which formerly had the 
shame of having elected Lord Fitzgerald, had been returned 
by an overwhelming majority. Athlone, which must be irre- 
vocably associated with the name and the treason of Judge 
Keogh, returned Mr. Justin Huntly McCarthy without a 
contest. Thus the country proved its solid unity. 

Meantime events had been happening in Parliament 
which were destined soon to give the Irish people an oppor- 
tunity of expressing their opinions in a manner still more 
emphatic. From the day when Mr. Forster introduced coercion 
for Ireland, the Irish members set before their minds the de- 
struction of the Liberal Ministry as their first political duty. 
It is not necessary to ar*gue here at any length as to whether 
this was or was not a wise policy. It has certainly met with 
the enthusiastic approval of the Irish constituencies. It was 
founded on the idea that the constitution of a country is its 
most sacred possession and its most inviolable right, that no cir- 
cumstances justify the interference of another nation with this 
right, and accordingly that the Ministry which had by coercion 



530 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

placed Ireland outside the constitution had committed treason 
so flagrant against Ireland as to call upon Irish representatives 
to inflict upon it the severest and the promptest punishment. 
Besides, the idea still prevailed in England that Ireland was 
an inferior dependency which had no equality of rights 
with England, and that accordingly to pass coercion laws for 
Ireland— the application of which to England belongs to an 
irrevocable past, and in the present would be productive of 
revolution — was an enterprise to be undertaken with a clear 
conscience and a light heart. The conception of Ireland as 
of an equal nation, with exactly the same constitutional rights 
as England, was an idea, therefore, which required to be 
hammered by repeated blows into the public mind of England ; 
and relentless war upon the Ministry which had placed Ireland 
outside the constitution was the means by which the lesson 
of Irish constitutional rights could be most emphatically 
taught. The opportunities for attacking the Government 
were frequent and were always taken the fullest advantage 
of. A rapid sketch of these attacks by the Irish party on the 
Gladstone Ministry will not be without its moral in the cir- 
cumstances in which England, English parties, and the Irish 
representation find themselves at the present moment. 

At first sight no enterprise would appear more hopeless 
than the resolve of the Irish party to destroy the Liberal 
Ministry. According to a Liberal organ ' the strength of the 
different parties at the beginning of the Parliament of 1880 
was: Liberals 350, Conservatives 238, Home Rulers 64. 
There must be one slight correction made in this ; the number 
of Home Rulers was but 63. The mistake of the 'Daily 
News ' probably arose from the fact that it classed Mr. 
Whit worth as a Home Ruler, because Mr. W T hitworth had 
made promises so studiously ambiguous as to leave him free 
to be regarded either as an orthodox English Liberal or a 
sound Irish Nationalist. Under the circumstances let Mr. 
Whitworth pass into the Liberal camp. The figures then 
should stand : Liberals 351, Conservatives 238, Home Rulers 
6$. Thus the Liberals had a majority over the Conservatives 
of 113 counting 226 on a division, and the Liberals had over 

1 Supplement to the Daily News, Dec. 24 18S5. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 53 r 

the Conservatives and Home Rulers combined a majority of 
50, counting a hundred on a division. But, as everybody 
knows, the Home Rulers did not remain a united party. 
From almost the start of the Parliament of 1880 they divided 
into two bodies— those who sat with the Liberal Ministers 
and generally supported them, and those who, following the 
example of Mr. Parnell, sat on the Opposition benches and 
generally acted as a portion of the general opposition to the 
Ministry. Dividing the Irish representation according to 
these different sections, it stood thus : Irish Liberals 14, Irish 
Conservatives 25, Home Rulers 37, Nominal Home Rulers 
26. 1 This makes a total of 102 ; the remaining member, the 
Rev. Isaac Nelson, could not be counted as a supporter of any 
section ; after a few appearances in the House he disappeared 
to Belfast, and neither entreaty nor threat nor duty could ever 
attract him therefrom again during the entire Parliament. Of 
the 26 Nominal Home Rulers, the Liberal party could count 
in every political division on the support of at least 23 (ex- 
clusive of Mr. Bellingham and Sir J. Ennis, who usually voted 
with the Conservatives, and Captain O'Shea, who in Irish 
divisions usually voted with the Irish party). Indeed, these 
23 formed the body on whose attendance on every political 
occasion the Liberal whips could rely more confidently than 
on that of any other section in the House. A number of 
them were not seen in the House except when the Govern- 
ment was in difficulties ; and their presence at Westminster 
was as well known and as infallible a portent of minis- 
terial danger as the petrel of coming storm. These 23, 
therefore, must be taken from the Home Rule total of 63 and 
added to the Liberal total of 351 ; and the struggle then was 
between a Liberal party with a nominal strength of 374, and 
an Opposition consisting of 238 Conservatives and 37 Home 
Rulers — 374 against 275, or a majority of 101 over the 
combined Opposition. 

Bearing these figures always in mind, let us see how they 
worked out on a few great political divisions. In 1882 there 

1 The epithet ' nominal ' was first applied to these gentlemen by Mr. Gladstone 
in his Leeds speech of October 18S1. The phrase was immediately taken up in 
Ireland, and became at once not only an appellation but an epitaph. 



532 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

was a division on the Cloture. The Ministry, with a majority 
of ioi over all Oppositions combined, escaped by a majority 
of 39. In 1884 it had a still narrower escape, for by this time 
the crime and folly of the Egyptian enterprise had begun to 
develop themselves, and to produce disintegration in the ranks 
of the ministerialists themselves. The despatch and then 
desertion of Gordon had brought the dissatisfaction of the 
country to a crisis, and on May 12, 1884, a vote of want of 
confidence was proposed. The Irish members had by this 
time their original hatred of the Government largely increased 
by the policy which Lord Spencer carried out in Ireland. 
That policy had resulted in making the Viceroy himself more 
loathed by Irishmen than any English politician of our time, 
with the single exception of Mr. Forster. His tours through 
the country had resulted, in spite of battalions of soldiery, 
an ubiquitous army of spies and detectives, in manifestations 
of popular hate as widespread and eloquent as any that ever 
greeted Czar in Warsaw, and he was unable to pass even 
through the streets of Dublin without an escort as large as 
any that to the scandal of Englishmen is required for the 
protection of an autocrat in a continental country. 

The feeling that at last the hour had come for striking 
back at the Government which had approved the policy of 
Lord Spencer produced an exultation amongst the Irish 
members which swept away all other considerations ; and 
although at that very moment the fate of the Franchise and 
Distribution Bill were at stake, the desire to avenge coercion 
proved an overmastering passion. The division took place 
on May 13 : the Irish members voted in a body against the 
Government, and the result was that the ministerial majority 
sank to 28. 

In the session of 1885 the opportunities of destroying 
the Ministry became even greater ; but still numerically the 
struggle between the two sides was apparently hopeless. As 
has been already stated, the Irish members had augmented 
their strength, and had, whenever the promotion of a place- 
man left a vacancy, succeeded in returning one of their party, 
and a Conservative had been replaced by a Home Ruler in 
Athlone and a Liberal by a Home Ruler in Monaghan. But 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 533 

altogether there had been no very great change in the 
strength of the different sections. The number added to the 
Irish party was altogether seven, raising their strength to 
forty-four ; and the number lost by the Liberals altogether was 
but three, and these must be further reduced to two, because 
they had succeeded in returning Mr. Sinclair in the place 01 
Mr. Chaine for County Antrim. On February 27, 1885, a 
division took place on a vote of censure proposed on the 
conduct of the Government in reference to General Gordon. 
The Irish members voted in a body against the Government, 
and the ministerial majority was reduced to fourteen. 

Immediately after this narrow escape of the Government, 
the Irish members received an ^ additional reason, if an 
additional reason were required, in favour of their policy 01 
relentless hostility to the Ministry. After all the bitter ex- 
periences of the dark and terrible years that had followed 
Mr. Forstcr's Coercion Act, Mr. Gladstone announced that 
the Ministry intended to coerce Ireland once more. On 
May 13, 1885, the Prime Minister rose and made the an- 
nouncement that the Government intended to propose the 
re-enactment of ' certain valuable and equitable ' provisions of 
the Crimes Act of 1882. 

Nothing further was done until the night of Friday, 
June 5, when Mr. Gladstone announced that on the follow- 
ing Thursday the new Coercion Bill would be introduced. 
But on Monday, June 8, came the division on the second 
reading of the Budget Bill. Again the Irish members 
voted in a body against the Government, and when that 
division was over the Gladstone Ministry had ceased to 
exist. 

The moral of this final victory, and of the various other 
divisions in which the Irish members have played a part, 
has been drawn by one of the most brilliant Liberal writers 
of the generation : — 

A second point (wrote Mr. John Morley) 1 that cannot escape 

attention in the crisis, is the peremptory dissipation of favourite 

allusions as to the Irish vote 'not counting.' The notion that the 

two English parties should establish an agreement that, if either of 

' Maa/iillatis Magazine, July 1SS5, p. 233. 



534 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

them should chance to be beaten by a majority due to Irish auxiliaries 
the victors should act as if they had lost the division, has been 
cherished by some who are not exactly simpletons in politics. We 
now see what such a notion is worth. It has proved to be worth 
just as much as might have been. 3 expected by any onlooker who 
knows the excitement of the players, the fierceness of the game, and 
the irresistible glitter of the prizes. When it suits their own purpose, 
the two English parties will unite to baffle or to crush the Irish, but 
neither of them will ever scruple to use the Irish in order to baffle or to 
crush their own rivals. This fancy must be banished to the same limbo 
as the similar dream that Ireland could be disfranchised and reduced 
to the rank of a Crown colony. Three years ago, when Ireland was 
violently disturbed, and the Irish members were extremely troublesome, 
this fine project of governing Ireland like India was a favourite con- 
solation, even to some Liberals who might have been expected to 
know better. The absurdity of the design, and the shallowness of 
those who were captivated by it, were swiftly exposed. A few months 
after they had been consoling themselves with the idea of taking 
away the franchise from Ireland, they all voted for a measure which 
extended the franchise to several hundreds of thousands of the in- 
habitants of Ireland who had not possessed it before, and who are 
not at all likely to employ their new power in the direction of Crown 
colonies or martial law or any of the other random panaceas of 
thoughtless and incontinent politicians. As for the new Government, 
sharp critics — and some of the sharpest are to be found on their own 
benches — do not shrink from declaring that they come into power as 
Mr. Parnell's lieutenants. His vote has installed them, it can dis- 
place them ; it has its price, and the price will be paid. In the whole 
transaction, the Irish not only count ; they almost count for every- 
thing. 

Thus, at last, after many ineffectual attempts, after years 
of waiting, the Irish party broke the Coercion Government. 
The news of this final victory was received throughout the 
whole Irish world with joy as mad as that which was dis- 
played by the Irish members themselves in the House of 
Commons. To wake up from such a regime as that of Lord 
Spencer was to the Irish people as an awakening from a hideous 
nightmare. But this joy, mighty as it was, received daily 
fuel, for every morning brought more startling announce- 
ments of the beneficent transformation in the political 
prospects of Ireland which the fall of the Liberal Ministry 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 535 

had brought about. By the Irish members themselves these 
events had long been foreseen and counted upon ; but never- 
theless they were welcomed as the realisation in fact of what 
had been hitherto only speculative anticipation. Mr. Parnell 
and his party had always declared that the destruction of the 
Liberal Ministry would mean not the aggravation and the 
renewal of coercion, but either its mitigation or its abandon- 
ment, and so it came to pass. Assuredly it ought to cause 
some searching of hearts among English Liberals that the 
death of a Liberal Administration should be the new birth 
of Irish hope and of Irish liberty, and that the birth of a 
Conservative Administration should be the death of Irish 
coercion. Another excellent result which followed the over- 
throw of the Liberal Ministers was to transform a number of 
them at once from coercionists to violent enemies of coercion. 
On June 8 the Government had been overthrown. On 
June 17, Mr. Chamberlain, speaking of Ireland at Holloway, 
denounced the whole system of government in Ireland, in 
terms of condemnation as clear and emphatic as could be 
employed by the most advanced Irish Nationalist ; and several 
times afterwards he announced his agreement with the Con- 
servative Government in abandoning coercion. Sir Charles 
Dilke adopted a similar policy. This was the attitude of 
Mr. Chamberlain after his expulsion from office ; but, mean- 
time, a revelation came which threw some astonishing light 
on his attitude towards coercion before his resignation. Mr. 
Gladstone, writing to Sir Michael Hicks Beach, announced that 
the Ministry had been practically agreed on coercing Ireland 
before their expulsion from power, and he even set forth the 
'valuable and equitable' provisions which were to have 
formed the new Coercion Bill of the Liberal Ministry. The 
' valuable and equitable ' provisions that were to be re- 
newed were the venue, the jury, and the intimidation clauses ; 
precisely those clauses under which some of the grossest 
acts of the Spencer regime had been perpetrated. It was 
through the change of venue and the jury clauses that 
the Crown officials were able to drag Mayo and Galway 
peasants, ignorant of the English tongue, to the special juries 
of Orange shopkeepers and enraged landlords who tried them 



53& THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

in Green Street Court-house in Dublin. And it was under 
the intimidation clauses that effective organisation against 
wholesale evictions was kept down during the Crimes Act ; 
and times were coming, though the fact was not sufficiently 
known or grasped, which would have made the renewal of 
coercion a disaster of national gravity. For 1885 came to be 
one of those years of periodic agricultural depression which 
bring the Irish tenantry face to face with the prospect of 
widespread and inevitable ruin. The severity of foreign 
competition, the badness of the season, the extraordinary 
depression of prices once more raised the dread alternative of 
retaining or losing the farm, of home or exile, of life or death, 
through hundreds of thousands of Irish farms. Once more 
the great, central, primordial battle of Irish life had to be 
fought out — the battle of the rent. If the Government had 
not been expelled, Lord Spencer would have been in Dublin 
Castle and a Coercion Act in full swing. The landlords 
would again be given all the vast resources of the Empire. 
Under the rigorous administration of the Crimes Act every 
blow made against the exaction of the uttermost farthing of 
the rent would have been checked by coercion magistrates, 
and every attempt at combination strangled by the omni- 
potent police. Troops and police, inspired by the spirit 
radiating from Dublin Castle, would have helped the evicting 
sheriff with fierce goodwill. Under the stimulus of Lord 
Spencer and of coercion, the landlords would have held out 
for every ounce of the pound of flesh, and Mr. Trevelyan would 
still have been able to boast that rents were more regularly 
paid under Lord Spencer and coercion in Ireland than they 
were in England, For again and again it must be re- 
membered that the Irish tenants were not making, either in 
1885 or in 1879, or in any preceding crisis, demands which 
were not at the same time made, and at the same time con- 
ceded, in England and Scotland. ' By almost general ad- 
mission,' wrote the 'Daily Telegraph' of Dec. 28, 1885, 
' nothing short of a very general and large reduction of rents 
by landlords can save a considerable portion of the British 
farmers from ruin.' ' ' The tenant farmers and others in 
Monmouthshire,' announced the 'Standard' of Jan. 1, 1886, 
1 Quoted in Freeman's Journal, Dec. 29, 1885. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 537^ 

' are receiving very considerate treatment at the hands of their 
landlords.' ' An important meeting of farmers,' said the same 
journal in the same issue, 'on the Flintshire estates of Sir 
Edward Bates, Bart, Sir Piers Mostyn, Bart., and Mr. H. F. 
Pochin was held yesterday, and it was resolved to insist on a 
reduction of rents all round.' And similar announcements have 
been made in the same strong Conservative organ of demands 
and of concessions of large reductions of rent in Scotland. To 
make the meaning of Mr. Trevelyan's boast more clear, then, 
the daily papers would have been at one and the same time 
describing the abatements of rent on almost every estate in 
England and Scotland, with their numerous and teeming 
markets and their unsurpassed railway development, and 
wholesale evictions in Ireland, with its poverty, its absence 
of markets, and its infant railroad system. Fortunately Lord 
Spencer was not in Dublin Castle, coercion was not in full 
swing, and the result was that the battle between the land- 
lord and the tenant for rent was to some extent equalised, 
and the landlords of Ireland were compelled by necessity to 
give those abatements of rent which, at the same time, were 
voluntarily conceded by the landlords of England. From 
the beginning of this agrarian crisis Irish papers have been 
able constantly to make the same announcement of abate- 
ments as are made in the English papers ; and some of these 
announcements are testimony to the main objection of the 
Irish party to the Land Act of 1881. Let us give some 
samples : — 

Lord Fitzwilliam has given a reduction of 25 per cent, on 
his Wicklow estates. The trustees of Mr. Herbert's estates 
in Kerry have given a reduction of js. in the pound. Mr. 
S. C. McCormack has given a reduction of 50 per cent, to 
his tenants at Ballycastle. Mr. Eaton, R.M., of Mitchels- 
town, has given a reduction of 50 per cent, to his tenants in 
Kilfinane, and the Board of Works, with the consent of the 
Lords of the Treasury, have given a reduction of 20 per cent, 
to the grazing tenants in Phoenix Park. 1 But that is not all ; 
for reductions, and large reductions, have been made in the 
' fair ' rents fixed by the Land Commissioners. Captain 
Plunket, R.M., has given an abatement of 20 per cent, on the 

1 United Ireland, Jan. 2, 1S86. 



pS THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

rents fixed three years ago in judicial leases. 1 Captain 
Dawson has given reductions of 2s., y., and zjx in the 
pound on judicial rents ; and Mr. John Conlan, of Rath- 
more, has given a reduction of 3j. in the pound on the 
judicial rents. 

Thus the landlords themselves have broken down the 
Land Act of 1881. A reduction of a judicial rent under any 
circumstances is a proof of the unfairness of that rent ; for 
the meaning of a judicial rent was not a rent that could be 
paid in one year and could not be paid in another year ; was 
not a rent that was possible in years of prosperity and 
became impossible in years of depression ; but was a rent 
which, taking one year with another, an industrious and 
intelligent peasant would always be able to pay. The judicial 
rents were first put to the test in 1885 , the farmers were face 
to face with a real and widespread agricultural depression, and 
the judicial rents broke down ; and as an English journal, which 
has been and is one of the ablest and most resolute enemies 
of the Irish party remarked, 'now we have to face the fact 
that the fair rent is unfair." 2 The reader has now another 
opportunity of comparing the attacks made upon the policy 
of the Land League, and the policy of the Land Act and of 
the Liberal Ministry. 

The change of administration produced another and an 
almost equally important result upon the land question. 
This is the proper place to quote the programme of the Land 
League before the Land Act. Immediately after the general 
election a Land League conference was held in Dublin, and 
there the policy of the League was formulated. Afterwards 
one of the most flagrant charges against the Land League 
was that it had no proposals, and that it never put its ideas 
into definite shape. The real fact was that so far back as 
the date mentioned it had given its ideas shape as definite 
as political ideas could receive. The proceedings of the Land 
League had not attracted any particular attention in the 
English papers or from English leaders, and in this, as in so 
many other cases, English ignorance or neglect of Irish affairs 

1 United Ireland, Jan. 2, 1886. 

2 Western Morning News, Dec. 28, 1SS5. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 539 

led to stupid and groundless charges against the policy of the 
Irish party. At the Land League conference the following 
programme was agreed to : — 

To carry out the permanent reform of land tenure, we propose 
the creation of a Department or Commission of Land Administration 
ior Ireland. This Department would be invested with ample powers 
to deal with all questions relating to land in Ireland. (1) Where the 
landlord and tenant of any holding had agreed for the sale to the 
tenant of the said holding, the Department would execute the neces- 
sary conveyance to the tenant and advance him the whole or part of 
the purchase money, and upon such advance being made by the 
Department, such holding would be deemed to be charged with an 
annuity of 5/. for every 100/. of such advance, and so in proportion 
for any less sum, such annuity to be limited in favour of the Depart- 
ment, and to be declared to be repayable in the term of thirty-five 
years. 

(2) When a tenant tendered to the landlord for the purchase of 
his holding a sum equal to twenty years of the Poor Law valuation 
thereof, the Department would execute the conveyance of the said 
holding to the tenant, and would be empowered to advance to the 
tenant the whole or any part of the purchase money, the repayment 
■of which would be secured as set forth in the case of voluntary sales. 

(3) The Department would be empowered to acquire the owner- 
ship of any estate upon tendering to the owner thereof a sum equal 
to twenty years of the Poor Law valuation of such estate, and to 
let said estate to the tenants at a rent equal to 3^ per cent, of the 
purchase money thereof. 

(4) The Department of the Court having jurisdiction in this 
matter would be empowered to determine the rights and priorities of 
the several persons entitled to, or having charges upon, or otherwise 
interested in any holding conveyed as above mentioned, and would 
distribute the purchase money in accordance with such rights and 
priorities ; and when any moneys arising from a sale were not im- 
mediately distributed, the Department would have a right to invest the 
said moneys for the benefit of the parties entitled thereto. Provision 
would be made whereby the Treasury would from time to time ad- 
vance to the Department such sums of money as would be required 
for the purchases above mentioned. 

It is scarcely necessary to say that these proposals met 
with fierce opposition and denunciation from the British press. 
* They were,' said the ' Times,' ' ' clearly confiscation pure and 

1 May 5. 1881. 



54o THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

undisguised.' These also were the proposals which were put 
forward by the Irish party when the land question was taken 
up by Mr. Gladstone. They were rejected at that time, with the 
result that they were taken up by all parties at a later period. 
It has been seen that Mr. W. H. Smith, in 1882, proposed 
a resolution which demanded exactly the same settlement 
for the land question as had been demanded by the Land 
League in 1880. In the excitement caused by the assassina- 
tion in Phcenix Park, coupled with the Crimes Act, the ques- 
tion was then dropped ; but on June 12 of the following year 
it was once more taken up, and on this occasion the sponsor 
of the Land League settlement of the Irish land question 
was no less a person than Lord George Hamilton, a leader 
among the Conservatives, and the son of an Irish landlord. 
One English journal at least appreciated the significance of 
this appropriation of Land League doctrines by Conservative 
leaders and by Parliament generally, for the motion of Lord 
George practically commanded universal assent. ' Another 
step in the Irish revolution ' was the phrase which it applied 
to the debate on the motion. ' The proposal,' it wrote, ' brought 
forward last night by Lord George Hamilton is the first con- 
spicuous sign in the new move in the game of party politics. 
. . . Irishmen will continue to get a little from the Liberals 
and then a little from the Tories, until some fine day we shall 
awake to the fact that they have got all.' l In 1884 Mr. Tre- 
velyan brought forward a Bill the principle of which was the 
principle of the Land League, but the measure proposed was 
so impracticable that the Bill was still-born. In 1885 the 
Government showed no signs of touching the question, and Irish 
members had despaired of seeing any attempt to make even 
the beginning of its settlement. But the change of Administra- 
tion produced on the land question, as well as on the question 
of coercion, a surprising and beneficent transformation of the 
political prospect. The Conservatives had scarcely been in 
office when Lord Ashbourne — as Mr. Gibson had become — 
brought in a Bill of a much more practical character, and 
in a comparatively short time the Bill, passed into law, 
and the programme of the Land League, five years after its 

1 Pall Mall Gazette, June 13, 1SS3. 



THE IRISH NEMESIS 541 

publication, and with all the savage and dread incidents 
crowded into the dreary interval, was embodied in the statute- 
book of England 

In Ireland the change in the Government was marked 
by unmistakable incidents. The Conservative Viceroy was 
able to dispense with the dragoons and foot soldiers and police, 
and to go unattended through the country and among the 
people. His reception everywhere, if not cordial, was at least 
not hostile. In the loneliest parts of the country he found 
himself perfectly safe from blow or from insult, and to make 
the transformation which the change of Government had pro- 
duced in Ireland dramatically complete, on one occasion he was 
driven through the country by Bryan Kilmartin, an innocent 
man whom Lord Spencer and a coercion judge and jury had 
sentenced to penal servitude for life. Crime at the same time 
sank to almost infinitesimal proportions. The sympathy which 
it was able to command when innocent and guilty were alike 
oppressed and harried, was denied now that the country was 
once more free. The severity of the agrarian crisis was miti- 
gated by the reductions which good landlords made volun- 
tarily and bad landlords made in obedience to organisation, 
as firmly knit as the trades' unions which extort fair wages 
and honourable treatment for English workmen ; and the 
bitterness which had sprung up between the peoples of England 
and Ireland became in some degree at least softened. In this 
mood the Irish people approached the great turning-point in 
their history, and entered upon the general election of 1885. 



542 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE GENERAL ELECTION. 

On November 14 the Parliament of 1880 was dissolved, and 
the next day the writs were transmitted to the different con- 
stituencies. The election campaign was one of the most 
curious in English history. It was opened in Ireland by Mr. 
Parnell, who declared boldly that he and his party had now 
resolved to have but one plank in their platform, and that 
this plank was legislative independence. In England, the 
campaign was started with equal emphasis by Mr. Cham- 
berlain. The member for Birmingham had a programme, 
daring, distinct, and uncompromising. He called for great and 
immediate changes in the whole social system of the country ; 
in the land, in the school, in the Church. Local bodies were 
to have powers to acquire land and redistribute it among the 
deserving poor. Free schools were advocated, and school 
fees denounced as an odious form of tyranny. The dises- 
tablishment of the Church was strongly suggested, and dis- 
endowment was pointed to as affording an excellent fund to 
supplement the education rate of the country and provide for 
the abolition of the fees in the schools. 

One point finally remained in the programme of Mr. 
Chamberlain. His allusions to Ireland immediately after his 
retirement from office have already been referred to ; his 
reply to the speech of Mr. Parnell did not carry out the pro- 
mise of these speeches. Mr. ParnelL's demands had been met 
in the manner characteristic of the first reception of all Irish 
reform by the ignorant public opinion of England — or rather 
by the ignorant guides of that opinion in the press — and there 
was a unanimous outburst of vehement vituperation and em- 
phatic rejection. It was while the tide still ran high against 



THE GENERAL ELECTION 543 

Mr. Parnell that Mr. Chamberlain had to speak. This was- 
a sufficient temptation to a man whose chief conception of 
political life seems to be the catching of every passing 
breeze. But there was a still greater temptation to attack 
Mr. Parnell ; Lord Randolph Churchill had spoken a few 
days before. The Secretary for India probably felt that the 
Liberals were desirous above all things to maintain their mono- 
poly in Irish reform, and were seeking to bully the Conserva- 
tives into declarations against Ireland which would have the 
double effect of estranging the Irish vote in the coming elec- 
tion, and, at the same time, of tying the hands of the Conser- 
vative party against any attempt to settle the Irish question. 
Lord Randolph Churchill had been astute enough to perceive 
this somewhat clumsy and palpable trick, and had therefore 
left himself and his party quite free to deal with the Irish 
question as the necessities of the future might impose. Mr. 
Chamberlain could not resist the temptation to make capital 
out of a passing passion, and out of the ambiguous and perhaps 
damaging attitude of a political opponent. Accordingly he 
attacked the speech of Mr. Parnell, and declared that Mr. 
Parnell's claims were such as no British statesman could agree 
to. These then were the cries of the Liberal party— Dis- 
establishment, Free Schools, Revolutionary Land Reform, and 
hostility to Mr. Parnell. 

For awhile the programme of Mr. Chamberlain was the 
only one brought by the Liberal leaders before the country, 
and it was emphasised by the incursion of Mr. Chamberlain 
into the favoured land of Scotland, where the reception of 
himself and his speeches almost equalled in enthusiasm the 
receptions hitherto entirely reserved for Mr. Gladstone himself. 
The Marquis of Hartington remained for some time in moody 
and, as it appeared, in baffled silence ; from Hawarden no 
word came ; and Sir William Harcourt — though he belonged 
to the section which has always hated and distrusted and 
opposed Mr. Chamberlain — was as eager as Mr. Chamberlain 
himself to catch the popular breeze, and with the charac- 
teristic attitude of the Opportunist political adventurer, pro- 
fessed agreement with the programme of the Radical apostle. 
And so for a time, amid triumphal processions and eulogistic 



544 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

addresses, meetings crowded to suffocation, verbatim reports 
and multitudinous leading articles, Mr. Chamberlain appeared 
the master of the situation, the hero of the hour, the figure 
and the prophet of the election. 

But there soon came signs that the Chamberlain pro- 
gramme was not the programme to win the election with, 
and the second part of the electoral campaign was mainly 
occupied in explaining away Mr. Chamberlain and the first 
epoch. First came the manifesto of Mr. Gladstone. This 
historic document was a dexterous attempt to please the 
Radicals by admitting their proposals, and to retain the Whigs 
by postponing the application of these proposals to a future 
which was not even fixed in time ; for it was described as 
more or less remote — that is, as near or distant as the times 
and the seasons and fhe political forces might decree. For a 
while the manifesto appeared a great success, for on the same 
night it was eagerly eulogised by critics so opposed as Mr. 
Goschen and Mr. Chamberlain. 

But time passed on, and it was discovered by the Liberal 
wirepullers that even the dubious manifesto did not sufficiently 
explain away the Chamberlain evangel. It was found that 
the speeches of the member for Birmingham had estranged 
the landowners — and the landowner is still a power in the 
Liberal party ; the Churchman, and Churchmen are still the 
majority in the ruling hierarchy of the Liberal party ; while 
the attack on the voluntary system, by the crude proposal of 
free schools, had arrayed in solid union the Catholic and the 
Protestant Episcopate, and all the adherents of religious 
education throughout the country. The intensity of the feel- 
ing on these different points had manifested itself in an unmis- 
takable manner. The Duke of Westminster — a great land- 
owner and a great Liberal — had refused to vote for a Liberal 
candidate who accepted the programme of Mr. Chamberlain; 
the same nobleman and several others — including the great 
lawyer who had been Lord Chancellor in the same Ministry 
as Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Chamberlain — drew up a manifesto 
in hostility to any Liberal candidate who pronounced in favour 
of disestablishment, and Liberal candidates throughout the 
country eagerly sought the support of the religious by vows of 
eternal fidelity to the cause of religious education. All these 



THE GENERAL ELECTION 545 

things proved that if the election were to be won, the Cham- 
berlain programme must be further explained away. 

Lord Hartington, taking courage from the intensity of the 
recoil from the proposals of Mr. Chamberlain, ventured to 
break silence, and to meet Mr. Chamberlain's programme with 
a timid negative. As time went on he grew bolder, and made 
assaults on the schemes of the Radical leader, that suggested 
the question whether two men so widely different in opinion 
would not more fitly be on opposite, instead of on the same 
benches. Disestablishment, the Free Schools, large Land 
Reform gone, what was left to the Liberal party ? To an 
English party in want of a cry there are always left the 
primordial and the baser passions of the populace — religious 
fanaticism, racial hate. A ' No Popery ! ' cry was anachronistic, 
but an anti-Irish cry was supposed to be still potent. An 
anti-Irish cry was the last card left to the Liberal party, and 
on an anti-Irish cry, then, they resolved to go to the con- 
stituencies. Misrepresentation of the purposes of the Irish 
party, strong personal attacks on Mr. Parnell, violent vitu- 
peration of his followers generally, and a lurid picture of the 
danger to the empire, became the stock in-trade of the electoral 
oratory of the Liberal candidates. Said Mr. W. H. Wills, 
a Liberal candidate, the Liberal party must be made ' inde- 
pendent ' alike ' of Tory Jingoes and Irish rebels,' 1 and other 
Liberal candidates employed similar language. 

Of course Mr. Gladstone did not stoop to the mean lan- 
guage of the underlings of the Liberal party. On the con- 
trary, he spoke of the Irish claim in terms of respect and of 
good feeling. He said : — 

What Ireland may deliberately and constitutionally demand — 
unless it infringes the principles connected with the honourable 
maintenance of the unity of the Empire — will be a demand that we 
are bound, at any rate, to treat with careful attention. ... To stint 
Ireland in power which may be necessary or desirable for the 
management of matters purely Irish would be a great error, and, if 
she was so stinted, the end that any such measure might contem- 
plate could not be attained. 2 

1 Daily News, Sept. 30, 1S85. i Times, Nov. 10, 1885. 



546 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

But he had scarcely uttered these words when he went on 
to make this declaration : — 

Apart from the term of Whig and Tory, there is one thing I will 
say and will endeavour to impress upon you, and it is this. It will be 
a vital danger to the country and the empire, if at a time when the 
demand of Ireland for large powers of self-government is to be dealt 
with, there is not in Parliament a party totally independent of the 
Irish vote. 1 

It required little logic to see how utterly irreconcilable 
were these two positions. If Mr. Gladstone intended to settle 
the Irish question, he must have known that it could only be 
settled for any real length of time by an understanding and in 
accord with the representatives of Ireland. A settlement of 
the Irish question which four-fifths of the Irish representatives 
condemned would obviously be a settlement which would be 
neither just nor practical nor durable. Speaking a few da)-s 
afterwards, Lord Randolph Churchill at once marked this 
fatal flaw in the position of Mr. Gladstone, and well described 
the late Premier as at one moment supporting the demand 
of the Irish members, and the next asking for such a majority 
as would enable him to silence them. 

Meantime a force was working quietly of which the general 
English public knew nothing. For two years at least previous 
to the General Election the most energetic efforts had been 
devoted to the organisation of the Irish vote in England ; 
and there were several constituencies in which its influence 
was already recognised by the local electioneerers as supreme. 
The manner in which this vote was treated was characteristic 
of the relations of the Liberal party to the Irish people and 
the Irish question. In constituencies where there was no Irish 
vote the Liberal candidates exhausted the language of abuse 
upon the Irish people and their leaders, and followed the 
excellent precedent of Mr. W. H. Wills. Mr. Trevelyan and 
the other official wrecks which the Irish question had left 
upon the political shore, spoke with a bitterness of the Irish 
claim which suggested inconvenient questions as to what was 
the difference between an English Radical and the obscur- 
antist Orange Tory on the Irish question. In constituencies, on 

1 Times, Nov. 10, 1885. 



THE GENERAL ELECTION 547 

the other hand, in which there was a large Irish vote, no lan- 
guage was too flattering, no promises for the future too big, 
no apologies for the past too abject. Take, for example, the 
case of Mr. Thorold Rogers. During the struggle of the Irish 
members against that coercion which brought such dark and 
terrible misfortunes to both England and Ireland, no member 
even of the Liberal party was more vehement in his support 
of coercion, or more malignant in his attacks upon the poli- 
tical and even the personal character of the Irish party. In 
the agony of the fight he made a speech in which he openly 
suggested that Mr. Parnell's part in the Land League move- 
ment was solely dictated by a greed for money, and that an 
examination of the balance-sheet of the League would show 
that Mr. Parnell was a thief. When the election came, Mr. 
Rogers declared his regret for having voted for coercion ; at 
one of his meetings his chairman made an appeal to the Irish 
as Catholics to practise their own doctrine of the forgiveness 
of sins, and the appeal was emphasised by an appearance of 
extreme contrition on the ' part of Mr. Rogers himself, who 
sate with bent head, a face concealed — concealed to hide either 
the tears that dropped from his eyes or the tongue that was 
in his cheek. 

Of course, neither the Irish people nor the Irish leaders 
were deceived by pretences so vulgar and so worn. The 
constituencies were asked to vote Liberal, that a Liberal 
majority might stifle the voice of Ireland ; and the Irish 
voters accordingly resolved not to vote Liberal. Their re- 
fusal to manufacture the rope for their own necks the Liberal 
leaders professed to regard as black ingratitude ; and pathetic 
references were made to all the Irish people owed the Liberal 
party in the past five years. In such appeals no reference 
naturally was made to the imprisonment of Mr. Parnell and 
Mr. Dillon, of Mr. Sexton and Mr. O'Kelly ; nor to the twelve 
hundred other men imprisoned without trial ; nor to the ladies 
harried under the statute of Edward III. ; nor to all the mad- 
dening acts of outrage and oppression which produced the 
homicidal frenzy of the Invincibles, and the dark tragedy in 
the Phoenix Park ; nor to the Spencer regime with its packed 
juries and hanging judges ; nor to the final fact that the 



548 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

last official announcement of Mr. Gladstone with regard to 
Ireland was the renewal of coercion. The Irish people re- 
membered but too well the things they owed to the Liberal 
party ; they neither lacked gall, to make oppression bitter, 
nor intelligence to see through the devices of the op- 
pressors. It was, therefore, with almost universal satisfac- 
tion that the Irish population in England and Scotland 
learned that their leaders counselled them to vote against 
the Liberals. 

This advice was conveyed in a manifesto, signed by the 
President and the other officers of the Irish National League 
of Great Britain — the organisation in which the Irish in 
England are enrolled. The manifesto called upon the Irish 
electors to vote against the Liberals in every case excepting 
some particular exceptions to be afterwards mentioned. The 
exceptions made were Mr. Joseph Cowen of Newcastle, Mr. 
T. C. Thompson of Durham, Mr. Storey of Sunderland, Mr. 
Labouchere of Northampton. This was but a small return 
to the courageous and splendid service these gentlemen 
had rendered to the Irish jause during its darkest hours ; 
and as long as there are Irishmen, the memory will endure 
of the way in which these men stood up from the ranks of 
the self-seeking and the time-serving around them, and in 
face of overwhelming odds inside Parliament, and a savage 
tempest of passion outside, maintained a consistent course 
and a sound policy. Exception was also made in the case of 
Mr. Lloyd Jones, who fought as a labour representative against 
the candidate of the caucus, and had been a life-long advocate 
of Irish rights. The manifesto was kept back to the latest 
moment possible. The Irish leaders judged that the very 
fact of the Irish going solid in one direction might have the 
effect of driving a quantity of the ' shifting ballast ' among 
the English people, who turn the balance at every election, into 
going the other way ; and that a manifesto in favour of the 
Tories might thus help the Liberals to get that overwhelming 
majority which all intelligent Irish Nationalists saw was 
the real danger of the immediate future. It was not written 
until Thursday, November 19, and was not printed until 
the evening of the following day, Friday the 20th. This 



THE GENERAL ELECTION 549 

left very little time for its circulation. Sunday is the best 
of all days for distributing political documents among the 
Irish population, a large number being easily accessible at the 
churches. There was but one Sunday left between the printing 
of the manifesto and the opening of the electoral campaign. 
Accordingly, the manifesto was telegraphed to Glasgow, in 
order that it might be printed on Saturday and distributed 
over all the Irish centres in Scotland by the Sunday. A 
number of the young men whose energy, zeal, and unbought 
work were the main factor of the overwhelming victory of the 
National League, remained up in the offices of the League 
at Palace Chambers all Friday night, and by Saturday mid- 
day copies of the manifesto had been received by every, or 
nearly every branch of the organisation in England and Scotland. 
Most of them had been previously informed by telegraph of 
the coming of the long-expected document, and had made 
arrangements for having it printed ; and in this way adequate 
preparations had been made for its propagation among the 
Irish voters throughout the country. All copies had been 
rigidly and universally refused to the press, and the intention 
was that the manifesto should appear in the newspapers for 
the first time on Monday morning. But the enterprise of a 
news agency defeated the well-laid plan. By a device 
that had better perhaps not be too rigidly inquired into, this 
agency obtained a copy on Saturday morning, and the 
manifesto appeared in the evening papers of Saturday. This 
was a disappointment, but it had its compensations ; it 
obtained the manifesto an immense circulation, and thus 
there was no danger that any Irish voter could remain in 
ignorance of the opinions and counsels of his leaders. 

Even those intimate with the work of the National League 
of Great Britain were surprised by the splendid discipline and 
the almost unbroken unity of the Irish ranks. The borough 
elections came first, and in the boroughs the Irish vote is 
especially strong. The result was that the first two days' 
elections went so completely against the Liberals that a Tory 
organ was able to declare that a defeat had been changed 
into a rout. The Irish electors were, meantime, gratified by 
the defeat of some of the men who had made themselves 



550 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

especially obnoxious by their support of coercion. The 
League had sent out for distribution a fly leaf in which were 
set forth the number of votes which one hundred members of 
the Liberal party had given in favour of coercion. When the 
first two days of the election were over the Irish leaguers 
were able to boast that they had rendered it impossible — at 
least for some time to come — for many of these gentlemen to 
give another vote in favour of the coercion of Ireland. Mr. 
Hopwood was rejected in Stockport ; Mr. Lyulph Stanley 
was rejected in Oldham ; Mr. Briggs was rejected in Black- 
burn ; Mr. Cross and Mr. Thomasson were rejected in Bolton ; 
and Mr. Arthur Arnold was rejected in Salford. But it was 
in Liverpool and Manchester that the Irish Nemesis fell with 
the heaviest hand. Of all the nine constituencies of Liverpool, 
not one was allowed to return a Liberal, and out of the six 
Liberals for Manchester but one escaped extinction. 

In London there was even a greater series of disasters 
to the representatives of coercion. It had been confidently 
calculated by the Radicals, in the enthusiasm of their hopes, 
that they would make a clean sweep of nearly all the con- 
stituencies which had been so largely added to the metro- 
polis. This calculation was made in ignorance of the vast 
mass of Conservative feeling in the capital ; in miscalculation 
of the universal disgust caused by the crimes and blunders of 
the last Liberal Administration, and in forgetfulness of the Irish 
vote, which is strong in so many of the metropolitan districts. 
A gallant attempt was made to oust Mr. Thorold Rogers 
from Bermondsey ; even the abjectness of his appeals had no 
effect upon the hearts of his Irish opponents. He was returned 
by a majority of 83 votes. Such a majority bears a striking 
contrast to his majority of 1,358 in 1880; and even that 
miserable handful of voters by which he escaped destruc- 
tion was attributed to a mean trick by one of his prominent 
supporters. In Fulham, Mr. George Russell, who had dis- 
tinguished himself by some ultra-coercive speeches, was 
defeated by the Irish vote ; in Kennington, the Irish worked 
with heroic energy, and succeeded in overthrowing a deserter 
from their own ranks ; and in Chelsea they reduced the great 
majority of Sir Charles Dilke down to the miserable proportions 



THE GENERAL ELECTION 551 

of 175. In Peckham, in East Finsbury, in Greenwich, in North 
Islington, in North Kensington, in North Lambeth, in East 
Marylebone, in Walworth, in North Paddington, in Rotherhithe, 
in Limehouse, in Mile End, and in St.-George's-in-the-East, 
they contributed the great part, if not all, of the small majority 
by which the Conservative candidates defeated the Liberals. 
In some cases they were, of course, helped by Liberal dissen- 
sion. In various constituencies throughout the country also 
the Irish vote made itself felt, and often in constituencies where 
it was comparatively small ; for the keenness of the contest 
and the closeness of the numbers between the two English 
parties made even a small number of voters omnipotent. In 
Reading a few Irish voters helped to temporarily exclude Mr. 
Shaw Lefevre ; in Pontefract there were about 150 Irish votes, 
and Mr. Childers was beaten by 36 ; in the Darwen division 
of Lancashire there were 200 Irish votes, and Lord Cranborne 
won by a majority of 5. Throughout Lancashire generally 
the Irish vote produced great results, and this in spite of 
potent appeals to their selfish interests or selfish fears. In 
many cases the Liberal candidate was also a large employer 
of Irish labour; and if the candidate himself feared or scorned 
to use intimidation, there were plenty of his foremen to hint 
that times were bad, employment scarce, and that as a Liberal 
defeat could only be brought about by the Irish vote, a Liberal 
defeat might end badly for Irish labourers. 

The difficulty of the situation was often increased by the 
character of the Conservative candidate, who, as often as not, 
belonged to the obscurantist days when hatred of the creed 
and of the nationality of the Irishman was part of the Con- 
servative stock-in trade. But the Irish voter laughed at the 
threats of the Liberal, gulped down his disgust for the Con- 
servative, and in North Lonsdale, and Eccles, and Ince, and 
Newton, and Widnes, helped to defeat the Liberal representa- 
tives. Down in Plymouth some hundreds of Irish voters were 
discovered at the last moment, and helped to return the Con- 
servative candidate ; in Brentford and in Hornsey there never 
had been an Irish meeting until a day or two before the poll- 
ing, and Brentford and Hornsey both went Tory. In Scotland 
there were ten Conservatives returned altogether — two for 



552 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

the Universities, one for a borough, seven for counties. The 
borough seat was Kilmarnock, and the Irish vote and a 
second Liberal candidate gave that to the Conservatives ; five 
of the seven county seats could not have been won without 
the Irish vote. 

The Irish vote was, then, one of the great factors in the 
General Election of 1885 ; and so it was recognised to be. 
In terms, sometimes of mild complaint, but usually of violent 
abuse, the influence of the Irish was described by the leaders 
of the Liberal party. 

' Fair trade may have deluded a few,' said Mr. Gladstone, 
commenting on the borough elections while speaking in 
Flintshire on behalf of Lord Richard Grosvenor, ' as free 
trade has blessed the many, but that has not been the 
main cause. . . . The main cause is the Irish vote.' x ' They ' 
(meaning the Tories), 2 he wrote to the Midlothian electors, 
' know that but for the imperative orders, issued on their be- 
half by Mr. Parnell and his friends, whom they were never 
tired of denouncing as disloyal men, the Liberal majority of 
forty-eight would at this moment have been near a hundred.' 
' Lancashire,' he said, in the Flintshire speech, ' has returned 
her voice. She has spoken, but if you listen to her accents 
you will find that they are tinged strongly with the Irish 
brogue.' 3 ' We have had,' said Mr. Chamberlain, ' a most 
unusual and extraordinary combination against us, and I am 
inclined to describe it as the combination of the five P's, and 
I shall tell you what the five P's are in the order of their im- 
portance, beginning with the least important. They are 
Priests, Publicans, Parsons, Parnellites, and Protectionists.' 4 
' Whatever else,' wrote the ' Birmingham Daily Post,' ' may be 
the issue of the elections, or however they may benefit by the 
Parnellite vote, Great Britain has most unquestionably re- 
jected the Tory party. But for the aid of their Irish allies, 
their position on the present polls would have been as bad as 
it was in 1880 if not worse.' ' But for the Nationalist vote 
in English and Scotch constituencies,' said the ' Manchester 
Examiner,' ' the Liberals would have gone back to Parliament 
with more than their old numbers.' 5 

1 Standard, Dec. I, 1885. - lb. Dec. 4. 3 lb. Dec. 1. 

1 lb. Dec. 4. 5 Quoted in Pall Mall Gazette, Dec. 7, 1885. 



THE GENERAL ELECTION 553 

This unwelcome and portentous phenomenon might well 
cause strange reflections in the minds of Englishmen and 
Scotchmen, as well as in those of Irishmen. The reader has 
seen in preceding pages the tale of the times and events 
which produced the enormous Irish immigration in England 
and Scotland ; and the historical student, seeing these exiles 
from hunger and plague produced by English law in Ireland 
become in time the controllers and disturbers of the best-laid 
plans of English parties and English statesmen, might draw 
another picture of the certainty of the Nemesis of wrong-doing. 
Englishmen and Scotchmen heard their voices stifled by the 
voices of Irishmen ; or, to use the figure of Mr. Gladstone, 
the accents of Englishmen were tinged with the Irish brogue. 
To this complexion, then, it hath come ; the vanquished has 
mastered the conqueror in his own citadel, and even in 
Eng'and and Scotland, Englishmen and Scotchmen are no 
longer the unchecked arbiters of their own political destinies. 

Assuredly the election of 1885 has demonstrated that the 
burden of proof lies with those who uphold and not those 
who seek to change the present state of relations between 
England and Ireland. The Irish in England and Scotland 
have proved that the opinions of Englishmen and Scotchmen 
may be overridden by the opinions of Irishmen ; just as Irish- 
men complain that the opinion of Ireland is overruled by 
Englishmen and Scotchmen. At first sight certainly the 
demand seems reasonable for a change by which the opinion 
of Englishmen shall be supreme in England, of Scotchmen 
in Scotland, and of Irishmen in Ireland. 

While English and Scotch elections were going forward 
in this somewhat incongruous fashion, the opinion of the 
Irish people in Ireland had been expressing itself in a manner 
the emphasis of which could not be doubted. The anti- 
National party in their folly had accentuated the unanimity of 
the country's demand for self-government. 

A fund had been collected — mostly, it may be as- 
sumed, by Englishmen whose venom was greater than their 
intelligence — for the purpose of supporting so called Loyalist 
candidates for the different Irish constituencies. The story 
is told that Mr. Forster was one of the gentlemen engaged in 



554 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

bringing this statesmanlike enterprise to fruition. The story- 
ought to be true, for the reason that it would crown all his 
preceding success in bringing about in Ireland the very exact 
opposite to that which he desired, and by his expedients 
strengthening and rendering omnipotent the forces he most 
detested. For these were some of the results of the starting 
of Loyalist candidates. In South Cork, the Loyalist candidate 
polled 195 votes ; the Nationalist 4,820. In Mid Cork the 
Loyalist polled 106, the Nationalist 5,033. In North Kilkenny 
the Loyalist polled 174, the Nationalist 4,084. In West Mayo 
the Loyalist polled 131, the Nationalist 4,790. In South Mayo 
the Loyalist polled 75, the Nationalist 4,900. In East Kerry 
the Loyalist polled 30 votes, the Nationalist 3,169. 

In the North of Ireland alone did any contest take place 
in which the National party did not win by overwhelming 
odds. There were two great disappointments. In Derry 
City Liberal electors refused to remain neutral, but voted 
almost to a man for a Conservative of such a type as Mr. 
C. E. Lewis, in opposition to a Nationalist of such a type as 
Mr. Justin McCarthy, and out of a poll of 3,619, the Conser- 
vative won by 29 votes. In West Belfast Mr. Sexton was 
beaten with a small majority of 35 on a poll of 7,523. In 
North Tyrone an energetic fight was made by Mr. John Dillon, 
but he was defeated by a majority of 423. A forlorn hope 
was entrusted to Mr. Leamy,in Mid Armagh, and if eloquence 
and courage and wit could have won the fight Mr. Leamy was 
the man to win. But the odds were all against him, and 
the Conservative candidate was returned by a large majority. 
The great victories of the North were the capture of South 
Derry and South Tyrone. Mr. Healy won South Derry, 
though the Catholics are in a minority of some thousands in 
the population of the constituency and in a minority of some 
hundreds on the electorate. But the author of the clause 
which did more than anything else to establish the rights of 
the Irish tenants to the property created by their own hands 
was popular alike with Protestant and Catholic, and by the aid 
of a large Protestant vote left behind him both the Liberal 
and the Conservative candidate. In South Tyrone, likewise, 
Protestant farmers enabled Mr. William O'Brien to beat the 



THE GENERAL ELECTION 555 

candidate of the landlords. The final result was that the 
Irish party fought eighty-nine contests in Ireland and were 
successful in eighty-five. They had besides won one seat 
in England, the Scotland division of Liverpool, and their 
entire strength then at the end of the election was eighty- 
six men. Four of these have been elected for two consti- 
tuencies. Of the eighty-two elected twenty-two were put in 
gaol by Mr. Forster, warrants were issued against four 
others, and there are in the number a '48 convict, a '6j 
convict, and a '67 suspect. By the action of the Irish vote 
in England and Scotland, the Liberal party, meantime, 
had been prevented from obtaining that overwhelming pre- 
dominance which the Liberal leaders so ardently desired 
and so furiously fought for. When all the contests were 
over the numbers stood thus : — Liberals, 333 ; Conservatives 
(counting 2 Independents), 251 ; Nationalists, 86 ; majority of 
Liberals over Conservatives, 82 ; majority of Conservatives 
and Nationalists over Liberals, 4.- 

The English press of all shades acknowledged the supre- 
macy of the position which the Irish party had thus obtained, 
and in journals of all sections and shades of opinion Mr. 
Parnell was recognised as the master of the situation. Even 
the papers which had most strongly denounced the manifesto 
of the National League of Great Britain now acknowledged 
that its advice was justified by results. So said, for instance, 
the ' Weekly Dispatch ' : — 

In common with the whole Liberal party (it wrote, December 15, 
1885) we had ourselves desired the election to result in a Liberal ma- 
jority over Tories and Parnellites combined. On the supposition that 
advocates of Radicalism would have been more largely represented 
than ever before in the new Government to be formed, we were 
willing to hope that not only English, but Irish reforms would thus 
be manipulated with a freer hand and with the most lasting results. 
Such a combination, however, is now impossible. The Liberals are 
in a strong majority over the Conservatives ; but they do not quite 
balance Conservatives and Parnellites combined. This condition of 
things, however, has its advantages, and amongst others there is the 
palpable fact that the completion of Irish reforms is no longer a matter 
of benevolent choice, but of stern necessity. 

1 United Ireland, Dec. 26, 1885. 



556 THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 

Shortly after the close of the elections the world was 
startled by the rumour that Mr. Gladstone was ready to con- 
cede the principle of Home Rule, and had even gone the 
length of preparing a detailed scheme of Home Rule. The 
statement was denied and repeated and denied again, with the 
final result that everybody believes Mr. Gladstone's mind is 
made up upon the subject, and that the continuance of the 
struggle against Home Rule will not be through him but in spite 
of him and of his best efforts. To Irishmen this announce- 
ment was welcome on grounds not only national but personal. 
Even amid all the bitter struggles of the last few years, when 
in the opinion of Irishmen Mr. Gladstone was dealing the 
most deadly blows against Irish rights and Irish hopes, there 
still remained a lingering kindness for him personally. No 
Irishman had forgotten or could forget that his was the 
eloquent voice and potent spirit that had brought the mind 
of the English people to believe in the destruction of the Irish 
Church and the destruction of the hideous land system, and 
every Irishman could sympathise with the generous hope of 
the man who has done so much for Ireland, that he should 
also reach the roof and crown of things by establishing peace 
and prosperity in Ireland on the solid basis of self-govern- 
ment. Many Englishmen will probably revolt at the idea of 
Ireland being endowed with a native Parliament, and the 
contest may be bitter and it may be prolonged ; but in one 
way only can it end. The contest between the set purpose 
and the solid ranks of the Irish people and the changing 
resolves and shifting fortunes of English parties is the contest 
between the sand and the granite, between the sea and the 
rock. When the struggle is over Englishmen themselves will 
rejoice in their defeat, and will join in the satisfaction that the 
wrong which they so vehemently defended should have been 
replaced by the right they so misunderstood. This book is 
an indictment of the Act of Union, and it but poorly serves 
the purposes of its author if it do not convince many minds 
that that Act has been a fatal heritage alike to the peoples 
of England and Ireland. He has passed rapidly through 
the hideous era of famine, through periods of coercion, 
of rebellion, and of emigration, of which that Act was the 



THE GENERAL ELECTION 557 

parent. To the Act of Union must be attributed the 
three famines since 1800, with their million and a-half of deaths, 
the exile of nearly three millions of Irishmen, and that Act 
in eighty-five years has produced from the Irish three re- 
bellions and from the British Parliament eighty-four Coercion 
Bills. To any Englishman, whatever his party, such a record 
against any system of government by any other people but his 
own, and in any other country but in Ireland, would bring prompt 
condemnation and swift resolve. Against Governments much 
less destructive Englishmen have subscribed and armed and 
died, and it is the writer's hope that some of the enthusiasm 
for liberty which other struggling nationalities so often gained 
from Englishmen may also be gained through this book for 
the struggling people of Ireland. In any case the Irish party 
have now a great opportunity. Unless the whole framework, 
traditions, and probabilities of English parliamentary institu- 
tions be unaccountably reversed, they will hold in their hands 
the fate of every English Ministry. That power they will use 
for the purpose of restoring liberty, prosperity, and peace to 
their land. The drear and tragic monotony of famine, emi- 
gration, revolt, imprisonment, and death seems destined at last 
to be brought to an end ; and haply, before many years have 
passed, the hideous facts recorded in the preceding pages will 
read like the records of nightmares that fly before the growing 
day. 



INDEX 



ABE 

Aberdeen, Lord, ici, 157, 158, 160 
Abolition of Purchase Bill, 268 
Absenteeism, 17 
Active policy, 243, 262, 278, 279, 

401 
Adair, John George, 171, 177, 178, 

179, 181 
Adventurers, political, 184, 185 
Afghan difficulty, 310 
Afghanistan, 376 
Agrarian crime (Ireland), 412, 413, 

414, 415, 416, 417, 426, 487, 498 

— (1880), 413, 416, 417, 498 

— (1882), 487 

— (1844-1880), 414 

— movement, 297, 302 

— system, 290 

— trials, 500, 501, 502, 503 504 
Agricultural depression, 297 

— labourers (Irish), 182 
Alexander, Mr. , 156 

Allen, William Philip, 213, 214, 215, 

260 
Airman, Charlotte, 321 
Amendments to Land Bill, 453 
America, 64, 73, 117, 157, 182, 205, 
212, 213, 255, 260, 293, 300, 309, 
311, 320, 325, 347, 356, 362, 363, 

3 6 5- 373- 396- 397. 5*3 
American army, 347 

— civil war, 206, 208 

— interviewer, 356, 361 

— Irish, 117, 202, 205, 206, 208, 212, 
282, 292, 293, 300, 301, 319 

— Land League, 311 
Amnesty movement, 218, 223, 231 
Anglesey, Marquis of, 2 
'Annual Register,' 35, 44, 114, 115 
Antrim Co., 249, 533 
Appropriation clause, 190 

Arch dale, Mr., 523 
Argyll, Duke of, 373 
Arms Act, 443 

— Acts, 15, 24, 25 
Arnold, Mr., 550 
Arrears Act, 496, 497, 499 

— question, 127, 128, 453, 484, 485, 
497. 498 



BEL 

Arterial Drainage (Ireland) Act, 18, 

25 
Ashbourne, Lord. See Gibson 
Assizes, Irish (188 1-2), 480 
Athlone, 81, 134, 148, 151, 152, 153, 

154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 167, 

184, 198, 510, 529, 532 
Attwood, Mr., 136 
Aughadrina, 171 
Aughnacloy, 522 
Australia, 161, 181, 182, 206, 208, 293, 

367. Si9 
Avondale, 255, 257, 258, 261, 464 



Bagot v. Bagot, 284 

Ballarat, 367 

Ballinahinch, 79, 81 

Ballinasloe, 301 

Ballingarry, 72, 205 

Ballinglass, 36 

Ballinrobe, 81 

Ballot, 225, 268 

Ballycaslle, 537 

Ballycohey, 220, 221 

Ballykilbeg, 248 

Balzac, 353 

Bandiera Brothers, 3 

Banim, John, 329 

Bank of Ireland, 465 

Bantry, 328, 346, 353,397, 398, 405 

— Earl of, 398 
Barnesmore Gap, 229 
Barrett, 212 

Barrington, Sir Jonah, 254 
Barron, Sir H., 112 
Barry, — , 209 

— John, 368, 370, 372, 400 

— Judge, 481 
Barton, Capt, 522 

— Rev. Mr., 257 
Bateman, Mr. W. S., 422 
Bates, Sir E. , 537 

Battle of Fredericksburg, 347 
Beaconsfield, Lord. See Disraeli 
Becket, Mr., 474 

Belfast, 247, 248, 249, 250, 264, 531 
Belgium, 307 



560 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



BEL 

' Belgravia,' 324 

Rellingham, Mr., 531 

Bentinck, Lord George, 35, 38 

Berkeley, Bishop, 25, 229 

Berlin, 310 

Bessborough Commission, 457 

Bewley, William, 169 

Biggar, Joseph Gillis, 232, 242, 243, 
244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 
251, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 
276, 277, 278, 285, 287, 288, 289, 
290 302, 307, 309, 342, 343, 376, 
372 395. 401, 420, 432, 433, 434, 
435 437. 44L 47L 49 1 - 49 2 

Bilton Hotel, 224, 362 

Birch v. Redington, 70 

Birmingham, 299, 426, 447, 542, 

544 
Blackburn, 550 
' Black North,' The, 520 
Black Rod, 364 
Blake, Mr., 101 
M.P., 372 

— Mrs. James, 171 
Blakeney, General, 3 
Blennerhasset, R. P., 226, 227, 261, 

312 
Blosse, Sir Robert, 169 
Bolton, 550 

— Mr. Ge rge, 500 
Bond, Major, 448, 449 
Bordentown, 256 

Borough Franchise, Irish, 410 
Boston, 255, 352 
Bowyer, bir George, 232, 263 
Boycotting, 387, 388, 428 
Boyd, Rochford, 171 
Braddon,' Miss, 324 
Bradlaugh, Mr., 343, 439, 443 

— question, 343 
Brady, Joe, 470, 511 
Brand, Mr. , 499 

'Brass Band.' See 'Pope's Brass 

Band' 
Brazil, 361 
Brennan, Joseph, 318 

— Thomas, 302, 308, 309, 395 
Brentford, 551 

Brett, Sergeant, 213 
Brewster, Mr. , 160 
Briggs, Mr., 550 

Bright, John, 315, 323, 343, 379, 390, 
393. 394, 426, 478 

— clauses, 309 
British Empire, 486, 499 

— people, 482 
Broadhurst, Mr., M.P., 463 
Brodrick, Mr., 527 
Brooks, Maurice, 263, 372 
Browne, Dr., 153, 154, 160 
Brownlow, Mr., 17, 18, 25 
Bryan, George, 263 

— John P., 300 
Bryce, Mr. , 313 
Budget, 533 



CAV 

Burke, General Thomas, 209 

— Mr., Assassination of, 488, 489, 
490, 491, 511, 512 

Burt, Mr., M.P., 468 

Butt, Isaac, opposes O'Connell in 
Repeal debate in Dublin Corpora- 
tion, 5 ; his rise to prominence, 
223 ; joins Amnesty movement, 
ib. ; his advice to farmers, ib. ; 
heads Home Rule movement, 225 ; 
elected for Limerick City, 226 ; his 
early career, 229 ; character and 
genius, 230, 233, 234 ; political 
difficulties, 231 ; character of his 
party, 232, 238 ; his early policy, 
234, 235 ; its failure, 238, 239, 240, 
241 ; Biggar contrasted with him, 
256 ; reproves Obstructives, 270, 
271 ; denounces their tactics, 276, 
277 ; explains his policy at meeting 
of party, 280; supports the Ministry, 
281 ; retires from leadership, 283 ; 
decline and death, 284, 285 ; re- 
view of his policy, 285 ; effect of his 
death, 285, 286 

Byrne, Mr. Garrett, 368, 372, 441, 
492 



Cabinet, 380, 394, 395, 424, 464, 

465 

California, 183 

Callan, Mr., 372, 491 

Callanan, Dr., 54 

Cambridge University, 257 

Canada, 65, 104. 305, 361, 494 

Canales, General, 354 

Cappoquin, 320 

' Carding,' 417, 418 

Cardwell, Mr., 189, 191, 192, 193 

Carey, James, 370, 511, 513, 514 

Carlingford, Lord, 458 

Carlisle, Lord, 3, 191, 198, 215 

Carlow, 151, 153, 156, 160, 161, 369 

Carnarvon, Lord, 541 

Carrickmacross, 197 

Carrick-on-Shannon, 44, 58 

Carrigaholt, 173 

Cashman, D. B. , 298 

Castelar, Senor, 361 

Castle. Sec Dublin Castle 

Castlebar, 58, 308 

Castlederg, 521 

Castlerea, 59 

Castlerosse, Viscount, 226 

Catholic Emancipation, 1, 2, 8, 225, 
368 

'Catholic Telegraph,' 143 

' Catholic Union,' 341 

Catholic University, 364, 368 

Catholics, 22, 71, 126, 127, 135, 138, 
139, 140, 141, 145, 147, 149, 170, 
194, 211, 219, 226, 227, 238, 248, 
328, 329, 330, 337, 341, 393 

Cavan, 250, 422, 432, 433, 521 



INDEX 



561 



CAV 

Cavendish, Lord Frederick, Assassi- 
nation of, 488 489, 490, 491, 511 

Celt and Saxon, 201 

Celtic race, 102, 103 

Census, Irish, 41, 42, 43, 46 

Census Commissioners' Reports 
(quoted), 44, 53-61, 63, 64, 78-82, 
117 

Central Tenants' Defence Association, 
301 

Cespedes, President, 357, 360 

Chaine, Mr., 533 

Chairman of Committees, 275, 276 

Challemel-Lacour, M. , 326 

Chamberlain, Joseph, 288, 289, 386, 
393. 394. S12. 524. 535- 542, 543. 
544. 545. 552 

Chambers, Corporal, 300 

' Chapel Bell,' 217 

Chaplin, Mr., 264, 380, 525 

Chelsea, 337, 341, 550 

Cheshire, 254 

Chester Castle, 299 

Chicago, 24, 293, 352 

Childers, Mr., 433, 551 

Cholera, 82 

Christian, Judge, 186 

Church Bill, 268 

Churchill, Lord R., 543, 546 

City Hall (Dublin), 315, 327, 332, 
3 6 5. 37o, 371. 406 

Civil Bill (Ejectments), 19, 23 

Claddagh, 328 

Clancarty, 227 

Clanricarde, Lord, 158 

Clare, County, 82, 474, 479, 480, 481, 
482, 487 

Clare election, 368 

Clarendon, Lord, 70, 71 

Clerkenwell Prison, 212, 217 

Clifden, 44 

Clonmel, 220, 316 

Clontarf meeting, 9, 10, n 

Clotures, 435, 491, 532 

Coalition Ministry, 150 

Cobbett, William, 26 

Coercion, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 

39 8 - 399. 4 12 . 4*3. 4 I 6, 4*7. 4*8, 
419, 420, j 24, 426. 427, 442, 444, 

45°. 454. 464. 472. 473. 477. 481. 
485, 489. 5oo, 508, 511, 529, 530, 
535. 547. 55o 

Coercion Acts, 15, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 
34. 35. 3 6 . 37. 38, 70, 106, 108, 
113, 114, 115, 242, 265, 333, 402, 
411, 420, 421, 430, 445, 447, 448, 
450, 451, 452, 460, 466, 472, 473, 
474, 476, 478, 482, 484, 497, 500, 
507, 514, 533, 536, 557 

Coffins hinged, 61, 124 

Colthurst, Colonel, 372 

Commins Dr., 370, 372, 49r, 492 

Compensation for disturbance, 290, 
291. 3°5> 380, 381, 383, 445, 
478 



CYP 

Compensation for improvements, 18, 

189, iqo, 191, 192, 193 
Conciliation Hall, 73 
Condon, Edward O'Meara, 213 
Confederate Clubs. 317 
Congleton, 254 
Congleton, Baron, 255 
Connemara, 78, 81, 498 
Conservatives, 127, 139, 145, 157, 

162, 188, 248, 249, 416, 427, 431, 

432, 435. 481, 482, 483. 49o, 5*9. 

529. 53C 53i. 54°. 543. 545. 550. 

55i. 552, 554. 555 
Conservatives' opposition, 383, 384, 

410 
Constabulary Circular, extraordinary, 

482 
'Constitution' (ship), 255 
Constitutional agitators, 224, 241, 

301, 353 
Constructive obstruction, 496 
Cook, Dr., 126 
Corbet, J., 173 

— Mr., 259, 372, 441, 492 

Cork, 47, 55, 137, 145, 167, 199, 312, 
316, 317, 319, 320, 344, 377, 397, 
422, 428, 440, 495, 506, 554 

'Cork Constitution,' 52 

' Cork Daily Herald,' 507 

' Cork Examiner,' 54, 316 

Cork Historical Society, 317 

— Scientific and Literary Society, 

3*7 
Corn Laws, Abolition of, 255 
' Corruption Committee,' 156 
Cory don, J., 299 
Coup d'Etat, Dr. Playfair's, 491 

— Speaker's, 437 

Courtney, Mr. Leonard, 273, 276, 

277. 342 
Cowen, Joseph, 251 

— Mr. J., 548 
Cowper, Earl, 484 
Cranborne, Lord, 551 
Cranbrook, Lord, 272, 275 
Crawford, Sharman, 18, 19, 2^, 109, 

in, 112, 114, 146, 149, 188, 189, 
Crawford, Sharman, jun., 235 
Crimes Act, 351, 419, 484, 492, 493, 

500, 509, 515, 516, 533, 536, 540 
Crimes (Irish), 407, 412, 413, 414, 

415, 416, 480, 481, 482. 541 
Croke, Archbishop, 514 
Cross, Mr., 310, 550 

— Sir R. , 432 

Crowbar Brigade, 172, 173, 179 
Crown officials, 541 

— prosecutors, 500, 501 

Cuban rebellion, 357, 358, 359, 

360 
Cullen, Cardinal, 140, 141, 153, 154, 

206 
'Cult of the jumping cat,' 278 
Curran, J. P., 201 
Cyprus, 310 



562 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



'Datly Express,' 504, 516, 523 

' Daily News,' 324, 361, 426, 467, 

S30. 545 
'Daily Telegraph,' 202, 236, 502,536 
Daly, Mr., M.P., 372, 441 

— Mr. James, 308 
Darwen (Lancashire), 551 
Davis, Thomas, 10 
Davison, Mr. J. M., 468 

Davitt, Michael, 260, 297, 298, 299, 
300, 301, 302, -03, 438, 460, 493, 

507 

Dawson, Mr. C., 368, 369, 409, 441 
■ - Captain, 538 

' Dear Lady Disdain,' 324 

Dease, J. A., 226 

Deasy's Act, 191 

Delahunty, Mr., 366 

' Demons of assassnation and de- 
spair,' 202 

Dempsey, Pat, 258 

Denman, Judge, 15 

Deputy-Speaker. See Playfair 

Derby-Disraeli Administration (1852), 

MS- x 47 
Derby, Lord, 146, 158, 184 
Derry, 422, 554 
Derry, South, 397, 554 
' Derry Standard,' 179 
Derry veigh, 177 
D'Esterre, 7 

Devon Commission, 18, 28, 29, 190 
Devoy, Mr. John, 299, 301 
Dewsbury, 429 
Diaz, General, 354 
'Dictionary of Commerce,' n8, 119, 

121 
Dilke, Mr. A. , 468 

— Sir Charles, 335, 394, 419, 535, 
55o 

Dillon, Mr. John, 309, 363, 364, 365, 
368, 385, 388, 395, 418, 439, 440, 
447. 45 2 - 462, 471, 491, 492, 495, 
522, 547, 554 

— Mr. John B. , io, 72, 73, 364 

— Mr. (magistrate), 178 
Dillwyn, Mr., 216 
Disestablished Irish Church. See 

Irish Church 
' Dismemberment of the Empire,' 6, 

39i. 392 
Disraeli, Mr., 38, 114, 139, 149, 150, 
239, 263, 264, 268, 281, 296, 310, 

3". 3!3. 3 J 4. 3 2 3- 375. 3 82 . 4 66 

— Administration, 252 
Dissolution of Parliament, 311 
Distress, Irish, 380, 382 
Disturbance Bill. See ' Compensa- 
tion for Disturbance Bill ' 

Doherty, Mr. , 17 
Donegal, 177, 292, 481, 497 
'Dove of Elphin,' 153, 160 
Dowling, 161, 162 

— Mr. Kichard, 330 
Downing, Captain D. J , 347, 348 



ENG 

Downing, Mr. McCarthy, 145, 235, 265 

Dowse, Baron, 374 

Drogheda, 313, 448, 449, 477 

' Droit de Seigneur,' 177 

Dromore, 331, 523, 525 

Drummond, Mr., 3 

Dublin, 31, 32, 55, 59, 68, 70, 113, 
164, 206, 207, 208, 214, 215, 224, 
230, 263, 278, 279, 315, 318, 328, 
33°. 355. 369. 37i. 393- 402, 446, 
464, 468, 470, 507, 532, 536, 538 

— Castle, 179, 207, 369, 496, 509, 

5 T 5. 537 

— Corporation, 4, 31, 229, 370, 470 

— county, 252, 335, 364 

' Dublin Evening Post,' 156 

' Dublin University Magazine,' 233 

Dufferin, Lord, 293 

Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 9, 10, 13, 
65. 69, 70, 72, 73, 128, 138, 142, 
143, 147, 151. 156, 161, 163, 367 

Duggan, Bishop, 171, 250 

Dunally, Lord, 422 

' Dundee Advertiser,' 468 

Dungannon, 522 

Dungarvan, 47, 76, 271 

Dumas, A. (pere), 230 

Durham, 548 

— Earl of, 494 

' Durham letter,' 129 
Durkin, Mr. C, 169 
Dwyer, Mr. John, 221 
Dynamite funas, 117 
Dynamiters, 395 



Eaton, Mr. R. M., 537 

Ebrington, Lord, 2 

Eccles, 551 

Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 139, 142, 
143, 144, 150, 191 

' Echo, The, ' 468, 502 

' Edinburgh Courant,' 467 

Edward III., statute of, 473, 547 

Egan, Mr. Patrick, 309, 395, 507 

Eglinton, Lord, 158, 159 

Egypt, 448 

Emigration (Irish), 63, 64, 65, 79, 
103, 104, 184, 196, 197, 198, 199, 
200, 201, 202, 241, 305, 455 

— (1849-60 and 1861-70), 199 

— clause, 453 
Emly, Lord, 137, 148 
Emmet, Robert, 207 
Encumbered Estates Act, 27, 102, 103 

— Court, 185 
Engineering, 250 

England, 3, 6, 16, 17, 33, 47, 64, 67, 
73, 82, 102, 104, 107, 125, 132, 163, 
182, 188, 192, 194, 210, 211, 212, 
217, 219, 220, 225, 226, 230, 232, 
241, 243, 255, 282, 292, 294, 298, 
299. 300, 313, 315, 325, 345, 353, 

3 8 3. 3 8 S- 39 1 . 39 6 > 39 8 . 399- 4°7. 
410, 418, 419, 429, 456. 464, 470, 



INDEX 



563 



ENG 

478, 481, 482, 489, 502, 512, 513, 

54o, 555 
England, Dr., 309 
English landlords, 17, 103, 294, 295, 

305. 45 6 . 499 

— Liberals, 12, 71, 72, 187, i83, 314, 
524, 526, 530, 535 

— members, 269, 378, 432, 434, 435, 

445 

— Ministers, 75, 76, 115, 116, 118, 
138, 223, 239, 241, 271, 297, 322, 
377. 382, 455. 528 

— parties, 33, 38, 147, 239, 240, 271, 
279, 280, 372, 380, 386, 430, 435, 
520, 545 

— people, 6, 32, 64, ioS, 114, 116, 
117, 130, 139, 150, 215, 318, 364, 
396, 419, 489, 512, 529, 541, 553, 
556, 557 

— press, 200, 201, 202, 211, 235, 308, 
398, 402, 443, 467, 489, 502, 509, 
512, 513, 528, 537, 538, 539, 540, 

555 
Ennis, 386, 388, 529 

— Sir J., 531 

Episcopalian Protestants, 521, 522 

Errington, Mr., 372 

' Espying strangers,' 263, 264 

Essex, Earl of, 196 

Established Church (Irish). See 

Protestant Irish Church 
Estate Rules. See Office Rules 
' Even-keel ' policy, 524 
' Evening Mail,' 157, 159 
Evicted farmers, 182 

— farms, 386, 387 

Evictions, 2, 19, 23, 24, 25, 36, 82-102, 

IIO, I7I, I73, I77, 179, 180, 221, 

290, 291, 296, 298, 302, 304, 305, 

306, 310, 373, 378, 380, 381, 382, 
388, 411, 451, 452, 474, 478, 479, 
484, 488, 497, 498, 499, 53b, 537 

Evictors, wholesale, 171 

Exports, Irish (1841-49), 119, 12 

121 
Extremists, 278, 362, 471 



' Fair-minded Englishmen,' 281 

Fair rents, 127, 232, 390, 391, 409, 538 

Famine, Irish, 16, 25, 26, 32, 33, 35, 

40. 52. 53- 54. 55- 56, 57. 58, 59- 60, 

61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 78, 79, 80, 81, 

82, 108, 116, 125, 195, 241, 292, 294, 

304, 384, 455, 478, 498 

Farmers, English and Scotch, 292, 536, 

537 

— Irish, 129, 182, 222, 223, 236, 291, 
292 293, 302, 304, 306, 308, 309, 
386, 389, 392, 454, 455, 456, 459, 
460, 462, 467, 515, 538, 557 

Farney, 197 
Fay, Mr. C, 372 

— Mr. P. McC., 280 
Federal Army, 347 



GAL 



Fenianism, 205, 219, 223, 224, 225, 
227, 231, 241, 260, 299, 300, 347, 
5°5. 5° 6 . 520 

Fermanagh, 521, 523 

Fermoy Christian Brothers, 398 

Fingal, Lord, 226 

Finigan, Mr. Lysaght, 343, 372, 441 

Finnegan, 209 

Finsbury, East, 551 

First Commissioner of Works, 342 

Fitzgerald, J. D. (Judge, afterwards 
Lord), 167, 350, 405, 406, 501, 529 

— Baron, 449 

— Lord Edward, 207 
Fitzgibbon, Mr., 47, 52 
Fitzwilliam, Lord, 537 

' Five-pound Repealers,' ^j 

' Five P's ' of Mr. Chamberlain, 552 

Fixity of tenure, 127, 222, 226, 390, 

39i. 409 
Flynn, Michael, 500, 501 
Foley, Mr., 372 
Foreign legion, 353 

— Office, 342 

' Forgotten slaves,' 289 

Forster, Mr. W. E., 326, 333, 380, 
382, 383, 384, 389, 390, 391, 393, 
394. 395. 405. 410, 411, 412, 413, 
414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 
421, 422, 425, 426, 428, 429, 430, 
43 2 > 433. 435- 43 6 . 442, 443. 444. 
445. 447. 448, 449. 45o, 451, 452, 
460, 464, 470, 472, 473, 474, 475, 
476. 477. 47 8 > 479- 481, 482, 484, 
485, 486, 487, 489, 490, 491, 493, 
494. 496. 499. 5°7. 508, 509, 512, 
S x 3. 5i4. 527. 528, 529, 532, 533, 
' 553. 555 

Fortescue, Mr. C. (Lord Carlingford), 
216 

Fort Sumter, 255 

Forty-one hours' sitting, 436, 438 

Forty-shilling freeholders, 2, 456 

' Four Years of Irish History,' 64, 65, 

3 6 7 
Fowler, Mr. W., 429 
France, 297, 307, 354, 390, 508 
Franchise, Extension of, 255, 517, 527 
Franco-Prussian War. 356 
' Freeman's Journal,' 82, 142, 143, 145, 

157, 215, 216, 307, 361, 370, 386, 

3 8 7. 389. 390. 39i. 39 2 - 437. 4 6l « 
463, 465, 468, 470, 504, 507, 526, 
^36 

Free sale, 127, 222, 409 

Free schools, 543, 544 

Free trade, 48 

French Army, 354 

French Republicans, 211 

Fulham, 550 



Gabbett, Mr., 372 

' Galaxy,' 323 

Galway, 55, 58, 124, 148, i8d., 201, 



564 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



CAL 



250, 292, 302, 313, 391, 392, 393, 
497, 422, 423, 428, 510, 53s 

Galway, County Election, 226, 227 

Gambetta, M. , 297 

General Election of 1847, in 

— of 1874, 231, 250, 278 

— of 1880, 312, 313, 331, 353, 3 62 . 383 

— of 1885, 541, 542, 543- 544. 545. 

546, 547. 548, 549. 55°. SS 1 . 55 2 > 

553. 554 „ . o 

General Purposes Committee, 338, 

339 
Genoa, 69 
Gerard, Mr., 36 
Germans, 256 
Germany, 390 
Gibson, Mr. (Lord Ashbourne), 366, 

454. 540 

Giffen, — , 520 

Gill, H. D., 351, 372, 441, 517 

Givan, Mr., 518 

Gladstone, W. E., 163, 193, 215, 219, 
222, 223, 225, 231, 233, 235, 239, 
245, 246, 290, 291, 300, 313, 323, 
326, 375, 379. 380, 381, 382, 383, 
389, 390, 352, 400, 402, 403, 408, 

409, 420, 421, 425, 426, 427, 428, 
429, 430, 431, 435, 43 6 . 439. 44o, 
441, 444, 446, 447, 449, 462, 467, 
470, 471, 473, 479. 485. 49i. 493. 
494, 496, 497, 499, 500, 528, 531, 
533. 535. 54o. 543. 544. 545. 54°, 
548, 552. 555. 556 

— Administration (1868-74), 190, 26S 

— Ministry, 530, 533 

— Mr. Herbert, 403 

' Gladstone and Irish Ideas,' 352 

' Gladstone's House of Commons, '496 

' Glasgow Daily News,' 467 

Glasnevin, 207 

Glengariff, 344, 346, 405 

Glenveigh, 177 

Glin, Knight of, 50 

Glyn's Bank, 163 

Godkin, James, 127, 199 

Godley, Mr., 104 

' God save Ireland,' 214, 348 

Gordon, General, 489, 491, 532, 533 

Gorst, Mr., 480, 512 

Gort, 182, 187 

Goschen, Mr. , 493, 528, 544 

' Gospel of cant,' 259 

Gosset, Capt., 245, 439, 440, 441, 442 

Goulding, Mr., 316 

Government, 4, 10, 14, 15, 18, 31, 32, 
34. 35. 37. 38. 44. 45, 4 6 , 47. 49. 5*. 
52, 62, 63, 64, 70, 71, 73, 78, 94, 
116, 117, 193, 194, 205, 208, 243, 
252, 266, 267, 270, 274, 275, 276, 
277, 287, 297, 308, 310, 311, 315, 
374. 375, 37^. 377, 378, 380, 381, 
382, 384, 385, 386, 387, 389, 390, 
392, 304, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 

410, 421, 425, 429, 430, 431, 432, 
435. 43 6 . 438, 439. 45 2 . 4 6l > 4 6 3> 



HER 

464, 465, 467, 468, 471, 475, 483, 
484, 485, 486, 489, 492, 493, 495. 
496, 497, 498, 499, 502, 509, 510, 
518, 522, 523, 525, 531, 532, 533, 
535. 536, 540 

Government Whips, -yj 

Graham, Sir James, 3, 35, 139, 146 

' Grahamising letters,' 3 

'Grand Old Man,' The, 493 

Grattan, Henry, 18, 25, 254 

Gray, Mr. E. D. , 239, 271, 310, 369, 
370, 372, 441, 470, 492, 504 

— Sir John, 125, 147, 175, 176, 197, 
215, 216, 222, 235, 290, 369, 370 

Green-Street Court House, 209, 509, 

536 
Greville-Nugent, Capt., 219 

— Col., 218 

Grevy, President. 317 

Grey, Earl, 36, 37, 108, no, 114, 255, 

408 
' Griffith's valuation,' 348, 349 
Grossc Island, 65 
Grosvcnor, Lord R. , ^52 
Guildhall meeting, 466, 467 



Habeas Corpus Suspension Acts, 

19, 20, 24, 25, 114, 208, 420 
Hamilton, Lord Claud, 523 

— Lord George, 540 
Hampden, Lord. 338 
Hampstcad Heath, 164 
Hancock, Dr. W. , 293 

' Hanging gale,' 128, 453 

Harcourt, Sir W. V., 103, 434, 438, 

439, 400, 511, 543 
Harper Brothers, 325 
Harrington, Mr. E. , 518 

— Mr. T., 515, 516, 517, 518 
Harris, Alderman, 470 

— Matthew, 301, 302 
Hartingion, Lord, 240, 263, 264,289, 

374, 3 8 S, 401. 4 l6 > 524. 5 2 6. 543- 

545 
' Harvey Duff, ' 476, 477 
Harwich, 230 
Haslingden, 298, 299 
Hatherton, Lord, 3 
Hay, Sir John, 483, 492 
Healy Clause, 400, 402, 454, 485 

— Maurice, 406 

— Miss Kate, 346 

— Mr. Timothy, 25, 29, 235, 244, 
246, 293, 294, 311, 312, 331, 332, 
345. 370> 397i 398, 399. 4°o, 401, 
402, 403, 40a, 405, 406, 420, 426, 
436, 441, 448, 449, 454, 461, 471, 
477, 491, 495, 515, 518, 519, 522, 

554 
Hennessy, Sir J. Pope, 317 
Henry, Mr. Mitchell, 226, 297, 446 * 
Herbert, Mr., 537 

— Sidney, 163 

Heron, Denis Caul field, 218 



INDEX 



565 



HEW 

ITewetson, Commissary, 47 
Hicks-Beach, Sir M., 230, 265, 270, 

535 
Higgins, Patrick and Michael, 500, 

501, 504, 505 
Hill, Lord A., 235 
' History of England' (Lecky), 25 
' History of our own Times,' 117, 

3 r 5. 3 2 4. 3 2 5 
Hoey, Mr. J. Cashel, 125, 190, 194, 

347 

' Home Government Association,' 225, 

231 
Home Rule, 223, 224, 225, 228, 231, 

240, 362, 366, 368, 392, 401, 556 

— Confederation, 279, 280, 281, 282, 

28 3. 3*3, 337 

— League, 252, 331 

— Party, 226, 230, 232, 238, 240, 

241, 250, 278, 279, 280, 2S3, 287, 
3° 8 , 3*5. 39 2 > 401. 411. 486, 530, 
53 1 . 53 2 

Plopwood, Mr., 550 
Horgans, case of, 423 
Horsman, Mr., 112, 189, 191 
House of Commons, 4, 2, 15, 18, 68, 

70, 71, 75, 103, 114, 115, 125, 131, 

137, 138, 146, 154, 165, 189, 236, 

238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 

246, 252, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 

267, 268, 269, 271, 274, 275, 277, 

279, 280, 281, 289, 290, 297, 302, 

3 IO > 3*5. 3 2 7. 33 1 . 333. 335. 33 8 . 

353. 370, 37 2 > 373. 375. 376, 377, 

378, 380, 381, 384, 387, 389, 396, 

398, 401, 402, 403, 406, 407, 409, 

410, 411, 412, 413. 414, 415, 416, 

417, 418, 419, 421, 428, 431, 432, 

433. 434- 435. 436, 437. 438, 439- 

440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 

451, 459, 481, 482, 485, 486, 489, 

492, 493, 495, 496, 502, 504, 512, 

5 X 3. 522, 527. 5 2 8. 53 1 - 534 

— Lords, 4, 18, 103, 115, 139, 
157. 158, 189, 245, 381, 382, 384, 
389. 453. 457. 458. 459. 499 

— Representatives, 309 

' How the Crimes Act is Administered,' 

504, 516, 556 
Hume, Mr., 114 
Hyde Park, 313 
Hynes, Francis, 505 

— J- 182 



Inchiquin, Lord, 72, 172 
' Incorruptible Parnell,' 254 
Independent opposition, 187 
Insurrection, 206, 207, 212 
— Acts, 20, 21, 22, 24, 108 
Intermediate Education Bill, 287 
Intimidation Clauses, 535, 536 
Invincibles, 470, 489, 511, 514, 547 
Ireland, troops poured into, during 
Repeal agitation, 7 ; famines in, 



25, 26 ; condition of, before the 
famine ot 1846, 28, 29, 30, 31, 40 ; 
ditto during the famine, 37, 41, 42, 
43. 44. 45. 4 6 - 47. 49. 5°. 5 1 , 5 2 . 
53- 54. 55. 56, 57. 58, 59. 60, 61, 
62, 63 ; increase of emigration, 64, 
65 ; famine of 1848, 78, 79, 80, 81, 
82 ; evictions (1847-9), 83, 84, 85, 
86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 
95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 ; 
exports in famine years, 119, 120, 
121, 122 ; change in Irish life 
through famine, 123, 124, 125 ; 
wholesale clearances in, 171, 172, 
173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 
180, 181, 182, 183 ; emigration and 
its effects (1841-70), 199, 200, 201, 
202, 203, 204 ; state of, in 1876-8, 
292, 293, 294 ; evictions in 1876-9, 
296 ; homicides and outrages in 
(1844-1880), 414, 415 

' Ireland for the Irish,' 202 

' Ii eland in 1862,' 175 

' Ireland in 1868,' 47, 52, 53 

Irish Americans, 117, 202, 205, 206, 
208, 212, 282, 292, 293, 300, 301, 

319 

— authorities, 381 
Irish Bar, 131, 132, 330 

— Bench, 405, 520 

' Irish Blanqui,' The, 367 

Irish hoard of Works, 46, 51, 537 

' Irish Brigade.' See ' Pope's Brass 

Band' 
Irish Catholics, 4 

— Church Disestablishment, 5, 217, 
224 

Missions, 170 

— College in Rome, 140 
' Irish Committee,' 104 

' Irish Crisis ' (Trevelyan's), 117 
Irish in England, 489, 548, 549, 555 

— Leader, 377, 384, 3S8, 397, 440, 
462, 497 

— Liberals, 531 

' Irishman ' (newspaper) . 201 
Irish members. See Irish Parliamen- 
tary Party 

— suspension of, 441, 491, 492 
Irishmen, 9, 11, 38, 103, 107, 114, 

146, 184, 242, 282, 283, 296, 298, 
304, 313, 315, 318, 379, 399, 400, 
434. 524. 532, 54o, 548, 553, 556 

— nation, 6, 7, 48, 76, 116, 204, 
462 

— National League of Great Britain, 
548, 549, 550, 555 

— Parliament, 27, 33, 219, 280, 392 

— Parliamentary Party, 35, 129, 146, 
150, 187, 234, 239, 240, 244, 259, 
261, 265, 266, 273, 279, 280, 282, 
297. 3 lS , 326, 332, 336, 369, 370, 
372, 373. 376, 379. 380, 381, 393, 
437. 438, 440, 443. 444. 445. 447. 
449. 452, 453. 456, 529. 53o, 53L 



566 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



IRI 

53 2 - 534. S3 8 . 539. 54°, 545. 54^, 
547. 555. 557 

Irish people, their gratitude to 
O Connell for emancipation, i ; 
their support of Repeal move- 
ment, 5 ; effect of Nation's' teach- 
ing on, io ; importance of potato 
crop to, 30, 40 ; sufferings in 
famine years, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 
56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 78, 
79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 
88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96 ; 
emigration of, 63, 64, 65, 104, 125, 
199, 200 ; eviction of, 97, 98, 99 ; 
100, 101, 102, 103, 296 ; attitude of 
British people towards, 117 ; change 
in manners through famine, 123, 
124, 125 ; the English press on 
emigration of, 200, 201, 202 ; affec- 
tions of, 202, 203 ; spread of 
Fenianism among, 207 ; effect of 
Manchester executions on, 214 ; 
rise of Land League among, 302, 
303, 373 ; attitude towards obstruc- 
tion, 302, 303 ; joy at return of 
Gladstone Ministry to power, 313 ; 
religious toleration of, 369 

' Irish People ' (newspaper), 208, 210, 
260 

' Irish Times,' 224 

Irish Tories, 526, 527, 531 

Irishtown, 181, 182, 302 

Irish vote, 2S2, 543, 546, 547. 548, 

549. 55o, 55 J. ,552, 555 
' Ironsides Park,' 256 
' Is Ireland irreconcilable? ' 125, 190 



Jagoe, Rev. Mr., 522 

Jamaica, 362 

James, Sir Henry, 227 

Jefferson, Tl omas, 368 

Jeffries, Judge, 211 

Jenkins, Mr., 273 

T ingo, 282 

Johnston, Attorney-General, 509 

— Mr. Willi im, 248, 249 
Jones, Colo el, 51 
Journalism of England, 200 
'Journals, &c, relating to Ireland,' 

196, 198 
Joyce, Myles, 503, 504 
Judges, Irish, 131, 132, 165, 186, 210 

— partisan, 12, 70, 73, 210, 501, 509 
Judicial offices, Irish, 132 

— rents, 537, 538 
Juries, special, 535 
jury-packing. 12, 70, 71, 73, 500, 501, 

504, 509, 511 



Keane, Mr. Marcus, 173 
Keatinge, Mr. R., 137, 148 
Kells, 182 
Kelly, Colonel, 212, 213 



LAN 

Kenmare, Lord, 226 

Kennedy, Captain, 81, 82-90, 92, 93, 
101 

Kennington, 529 

Kenny, Mr., M.P., 529 

Kensington, 551 

Keogh, Mr. VV. (afterwards Judge), 
129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 
136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 
143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 
151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 
158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 
16S, 210, 215, 225, 227, 237, 241, 
250, 278, 312, 316, 353, 396, 510, 

5 2 9 
Kerr, Mr. M., 523 
Kerry, 226, 261, 322, 336, 497, 517, 

537. 554 
' Kerry Sentinel, 517 
Kettle', Mr. A. J., 308, 309 
Kildare and Leighhn, Bishop of, 156 
Kildare County Convention, 414 
Kilfinane, 515, 537 
Kilkenny, 215, 220, 554 
Killala, Bishop of, 153 
Killen, Mr. J. B., 309 
Kilmainham, 55, 56, 466, 476, 496, 

499 

— Treaty, 484, 485 

Kilmallock, 449 

Kilmarnock, 552 

Kilmartin, Bryan, 541 

Kilrush Union, evictions in, 82, S3, 

84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 
Kinahan, Mr., 224 
King-Harman, Colonel, 224, 239, 240, 

33 2 i 403. 404. 5 2 3 
King's County, 424 
Kirk, Miss, 474, 475 
Kirkc, Mr., 271 
Kirk-Langley, 257 
Knatchbull-Hugcssen, Mr., 275 
Knox, Major, 224 
Kossuth, 309 



Laboucheke, Mr. II., 29, 421, 425, 

426, 451, 475, 548 
Labour Rate Act, 46. 48, 49, 52, 63 
Labourers, Irish, 182, 453, 515 
Ladies' Land League, 47a 
Lahiff, Mr., 182 
Lalor, Mr. J. F. , 367 

— Mr. R., 367, 370, 372, 441, 492 
Lambeth, North, 551 
Lanibton, Hon. Mr., 494 
Lancashire, 551, 552 

Land Act of 1870, 221, 222, 223. 231 
235, 236, 238, 268, 290, 291, 296, 
301, 306, 374, 381, 385, 409, 453, 

454. 456 

— of 1881, 376, 382, 386, 409, 
436, 446, 477, 451. 45 2 . 453. 454. 
457. 4 r i8, 459. 4 &I . 4£> 2 . 463, 464, 
465, 468.. 483, 485, 5i8,'537. 538 



INDEX 



567 



LAN 

Land Acts and Bills, 23, 24, 25, 189, 
190, 191, 235, 374, 400, 402, 407, 
438, 446 

— Bill (Mr. Redmond's), 485 

— Commissioners (Bessborough), 371, 

375. 384. 385. 386, 387 

— Court, 196, 453, 456, 457, 459, 
460, 461, 462 

— League, 236, 297, 301, 302, 308, 
309, 310, 311, 312, 333, 348, 350, 

35i. 35 2 . 3 6 3. 3 6 4. 3 6 5- 373- 3 8 o, 

381, 0382, 385, 405, 407, 410, 412, 

428, 429, 447, 451, 453, 454, 457, 

459, 461, 466, 467, 468, 471, 472, 

473, 478, 483, 484, 486, 498, 507, 

5"> 5*3. 5*4. 5 21 - S3 8 , 54°, 547 

— meetings, 302, 306, 308 

— Question, Irish, 17, 19, 168, 
188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 
195, 219, 223, 234, 290, 291, 302, 
304, 310, 372, 374, 376, 377, 380, 
386, 387, 389, 390, 453, 483, 485, 

5*3. 53 8 > 54° 
Landlordism, Irish, 297, 298, 302, 

39o, 39i, 392, 4°i. 5°°> 5 DI 
Landlords, Irish, 16, 17, 18, 19, 
26, 27, 37, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 85, 
87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 102, 103, 
104, 123, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 
173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 
236, 291, 293, 294, 295, 302, 305, 
306, 307, 310, 378, 379, 384, 388, 
390, 391, 393, 403, 407, 409, 410, 
412, 451, 453, 457, 458, 463, 468, 
470, 483, 488, 499, 501, 520, 523, 
527, 528, 540, 555 
' Land of Eire, ' 299 
Lansdowne, Lord, 115. 175, 176 
Larcom, Sir Thomas, 179, 191 
Larkin, Michael, 213, 214, 215, 260 
' Last Conquest of Ireland,' 13 
Lavelle, Father, 169, 171, 172 
Law, Right Hon. Hugh, 350, 395, 

402, 454 
Lawson, Judge, 132, 501, 504 

— Sir W. , 411 
Leadam, Mr., 25 
Leahy, Mr., 372, 411, 492 

Leamy, Mr. E. , 330, 365, 366, 372, 

434, 441, 491, 554 
Leaseholders, 453, 485, 497 
Leatham, Mr. W. H. , 429, 430 
Lecky, 26 

Leeds speech of Mr. Gladstone, 462 
Legislative independence, 392 
Leinster, Duke of, 196 
Leitrim, 497 

— Lord, 169, 171, 177 
' Levant ' ship, 255 
Lever, Mr. J. O., 313 
Levinge, Sir R. , 148, 157 
Lewis, Mr. C. , 250, 554 
Liberalism in Ireland, 188 
Liberals, 2, 3, 113, 188, 260, 264, 269, 

275. 277, 288, 289, 427, 431, 435, 



MAC 

458. 493. 519. 53°. 532. 534. 548, 
549. 55°. 552, 554, 555 
Liberal candidates, 313, 545, 546, 551, 
552, 554 

— Ministry, 238, 240, 315, 316, 

372. 373. 374. 375. 376, 378, 379. 

382, 383, 384, 388, 389, 394, 395, 

407, 417, 434, 459, 461, 478, 4S3, 

489, 491, 494, 495, 526, 528, 529, 

S30. 53i. 532, 534. 535. 538. 55o 

— Party, 2, 188, 190, 240, 259, 
264, 273, 311, 313, 314, 383, 411, 
440, 494, 527, 531, 543, 544, 545, 
546, 547, 548, 549, 550 

— Press, 308 

— Whips, 240, 531 

' Life of C. S. Parnell,' 255, 256, 257 
' Life of Lord George Bentinck, ' 68 
'Life of M. Davitt,' 298 
Limehouse, 551 
Limerick, 47, 124, 148, 280, 281, 450, 

477 

— City election, 226 
Lincoln, Lord, 19 
Littleton, Mr. Secretary, 3 
Litton, Mr., 457 

Liverpool, 64, 107, 181, 321, 550, 555 
Live stock, Irish (1847-49), 12 °> I21 
Lloyd, Mr. Clifford, 448, 449, 450, 

4Si. 473, 474, 475, 476, 478, 481, 

482 
Loan fund, 529 
London, 31, 70. 150, 163, 184, 214, 

227, 289, 299, 320, 321, 322, 335, 

353. 372, 393. 400, 488 
Longford, 218, 219, 225, 375, 389, 435, 

480 
Lonsdale, North, 551 
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, 159, 186, 

248^ 419, 475, 511, 524 
Lords' Committee, 68 
Lough Barra, 179 

— Mask murders, 501, 504 
Loughrea, 55, 171 

Lowe, Mr., 192, 194 

Lowther, Mr. J., 297, 306, 310 

Loyalists, Irish, 523, 524, 553, 554 

' Loyalty plus Murder,' 522, 523, 524 

Luby, Mr. T. C, 208, 219 

Lucan, Lord, 169, 171 

Lucas, Mr. F., 127, 147, 151, 161, 

163. 323 

— Mr. S., 323 
Lydon, J., 424 
Lynch, Mr., 18, 25 
Lyons, Dr., 433, 435 



Maamtrasna Massacre, 503 
Macartney, Mr., 235 
Macaulay, Lord, 70 
Macclesfield, 321 

MacDonnell, Dr. Robert, 208, 209 
Macfarlane, Mr., 372 
MacGahan. Mr. J. A., 358 



568 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



MAC 

Mackay, Capt., 506, 507 
MacKnight, Dr.. 127 
MacManus, Thomas Bellew, 206 
' Macmillan's Magazine,' 533 
MacNevin, R. C, 159 
M' Award, Widow, 179 
McCarthy, Col. -Sergeant, 300 

— Mr. J., 41, 61, 117, 187, 297, 315, 
316, 317, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 
325, 326, 327, 371, 372, 374, 375, 
398, 409, 435, 43 6 . 44L 49 1 - 493' 
554 

— Mr. J. H., 529 
McClure, Sir Thomas, 249 
McCoan, Mr., 371, 372, 441 
McCormack, Miss, imprisoned, 474 
McDonough, Ellen, 479 

M'Gee, Mr. T. D., 72, 73 
McGrath, M., 404, 405, 406 
McHale, Archbishop, 141. 153, 154, 

2Q& 

McKenna, Sir J. N., 372 
McKie, Major, 101 
M'Mahon, Evor, 196 
McMahon, Mr. M.P., 529 

— Michael, 173 
McMechan, Mr., 248 
Magan, Capt., 148 

Magistrates, Coercion, 474, 475, 515, 

516 
Maguire, John Francis, 127, 147, 189, 

192, 193, 205 

— Thos., 213, 214 
Mahdi, The, 361 
Maher, Father, 156 

Mahon, The O'Gorman, 367, 368, 372, 

441, 442 
Mail service, Transatlantic, 184 
Mallon, Superintendent, 465 
Mallow, 505, 509, 510 
Mambi Land, 358 
Manayunk, 300 
Manchester, 212, 213, 216, 217, 260, 

55° . , 

' Manchester Examiner, 467, 468, 

55 2 
' Manchester Review,' 202 
Mangan. Curley, 404, 405 
Mansion House Relief Committee, 

3 6, 370 
'Mark Lane Express,' 31 
Marlborough, Duchess of, 306, 310 

— Duke of, 310, 468 
'Martin, James,' 362 

Martin, John, 214, 219, 225, 226, 251, 
252 

— ['., 235, 372 

Marum, Mr., 367, 372, 441, 491, 492 

Marylebone, East, 551 

Marwood, 504 

' Mary ' of the Nation, 320 

Maryborough, 254 

Mathew, Rev. Theobald, 41, 42 

Mathews, Acting-Constable, 516 

Mauritius, 317 



MUR 

Maximilian, Emperor, 354 
Maynooth, 15 

Mayo, 42, 64, 78, 81, 82, 124, 147, 
292, 298, 302, 369, 393, 497, 507, 

535. 554 
Mazzini, 3 

Meagher, Thomas Francis, 318, 366 
Meath, 147, 203, 226, 251, 289, 328 

— Bishop of, 153 
Mechanics' Institutes, 328 
Melbourne, 293 

— Lord, 17, 255 

— Ministry, 4 

Meldon, Mr. C. , 240, 312, 372 

Metge, Mr., 369, 441, 491 

Mexico, 354 

Midlothian campaign, 374, 375, 552 

Migratory Labourers, 292, 293 

Milbank, Mr., 433 

Militia Bill, 145 

Mill, John Stuart, 29, 322 

Millstreet, 477 

Milltown-Malbay, 172, 474 

Ministerial party, 239, 401, 416, 431, 
491, 494, 495, 511 

Ministers, 289 

Mitchel, Jchn, 10, 11, 13, 14, 32, 33, 
35. 49. 50. 5 2 > 6 9- 7°- 7i. 72; 251, 
3!7. 3 l8 > 3 6 5- 367. 40 1 

Mitchel's ' History of Ireland,' 49, 108 

Mitchelstown, 537 

Moate, 148, 158 

Moderate Home Rulers. See Nomi- 
nal Home Rulers 

Molesworth Hall, 289, 365 

Monaghan, County, 242, 250, 518, 520, 

521. 53 2 
Monaghan, Judge, 178 
Monk, Mr., 273 
Monroe, Mr. J. (Q.C.), 519 
Monsell, Mr. See Lord Emly 
Monteney, 354 
Moore, George Henry, 147, 151, 189 

— Mr., 235 

— Mrs., 474, 475 
Morales, General, 359 
Moriarty, Bishop, 227 
Morley, Mr. John, 533 

' Morning Star,' 322, 323 

Moroney, Mrs., 474 

Morrisson's Hotel, 300 

Mostyn, Sir P. , 537 

Mountjoy Prison, 208, 209 

Mount Nugent, 173 

Mulgrave, Lord, 3 

Mulhall's 'Dictionary of Statistics,' 

199, 200 
Mulholland, Mr., 235 
Mullingar, 517 
Municipal Councils, 4 

— elections, Ireland, 482 

— reform, 4 
Munster, 127 

Murders in Ireland (1844-1880), 415 
Murphy, Mr. N. D., 312, 313 



INDEX 



569 



MUR 

Murphy, Serjeant, 186 

' Murty Hynes,' 349, 350, 352 

Mutiny Bill, 267, 272 

' My Enemy's Daughter,' 324 



NAAS, 464 

— Lord (Earl of Mayo), 159, 162 
Nagle, Alderman, 507 

Naish, Attorney-General, 510 

Napier, Sir J., 188 

' Nation ' (newspaper), 10, 66, 128, 
129, 142, 143, 155, 157, 165, 166, 
167, 187, 200, 201, 279, 280, 328, 

33°. 33 1 . 33 2 . 346, 347. 348, 397. 
401 
National Convention (1881), 447, 460 

— Education Commissioners, 196 

— League, 293 

— meetings in Ulster, 521, 522, 523, 

S24. S25 

— party, 33, 68, 70, 140, 188, 252, 
261, 279, 316, 372, 377 

— schools, 196 

Nationalists, 218, 219, 246, 253, 265, 
2 99- 3 OI > 302, 313, 372, 390, 519, 
520, 521, 530, 535, 542, 548, 554, 

555 
Neligan, Mr. J. C, 517 
Nelson, Rev. Isaac, 369, 441, 531 
Newcastle, 398, 548 

— Duke of, 158, 162 
Newdegate, Mr., 139 

' New Departure,' 301 . 

Newgate, 212 

'New Ireland' (quoted), 40, 44, 45, 
50, 51, 124, 127, 137, 146, 147, 151, 
163, 164, 165, 178, 180, 253, 270, 

273. 343. 3 62 
New Orleans, 318 
Newport, Sir John, 17 
New Ross, 147, 389, 390 
New Rules, 276, 335 
Newry, 521 
Newtown, 551 
New York, 184, 255, 300, 311, 352, 

355. 356 
' New York Herald,' 356, 357, 358 
New York ' Irish People,' 347 
New Zealand, 293 
Nicholls, Mr. F., 182 
Nicholson, Mr., 171, 182 
Nimmo, Mr. Alexander, 28 
Nolan, Colonel, 227, 250, 271 
Nominal Home Rulers, 263, 379, 528, 

529. 53i 
' No Popery, 130, 249, 545 
' No Rent,' 69, 367 
' No-Rent ' Manifesto, 453, 461, 471 
Nonnanby, Lord, 3 
Norris, Mr. (solicitor), 164 
Northampton, 426 
North and South League, 126, 127 
Northcote, SirS., 240, 273, 274, 275, 

333- 433. 435. 468, 524, 526 



o'co 

' Northern Times,' 321 
• Northern Whig,' 519 
Norton, Mr. Thomas, 154, 155 
Notices to quit, 151 
Nulty, Bishop, 173 



O'Beirne, William, 136 
O'Brien, Mr. Barry, 18, 190 

— Judge, 501 

— M. {alias Gould), 213, 214, 215, 
260 

— Mr. Peter, 350 

— Mrs. , 505, 508 

— Sir Patrick, 232, 239, 372 

— William, 487, 488, 505, 506, 507, 
508, 509, 510, 511, 554 

— William Smith, 18, 25, 70, 72, 7^ 
205, 316, 318, 345 

Obstruction, 243, 261, 268, 273, 275, 
287, 288, 304, 432, 433, 434, 496 

Obstructive policy, 277 

Obstructives, 268, 269, 272, 275, 277, 
283 

O'Connell, Daniel, his work for the 
Irish people, 1, 2 ; disappointed 
with Emancipation, 2 ; starts Repeal 
agitation, 2 ; opposed by Liberals, 
2, 3 ; prosecuted, 3 ; reviles Whigs, 
3 ; his Repeal motion defeated, 3 ; 
works for redress of minor griev- 
ances, 3 ; is elected Lord Mayor of 
Dublin, 4 ; supports Melbourne 
Ministry, 4 ; again starts Repeal 
agitation, 4 ; carries Repeal motion 
in Dublin Corporation, 5 ; effect on 
agitation, 5 ; his action after Tara 
meeting, 6, 7 ; habits and daily 
life at this time, 7 ; character of 
speeches, 8, 9 ; his attitude towards 
Young Irelanders, 10, 11 ; his action 
atClontarf, 11, 12 ; effect on Repeal 
movement, 12 ; prosecuted and im- 
prisoned, 12 ; is released, 13 ; 'a 
broken man, ' 13 ; popular opinion, 
14 ; decay of his power, 15 ; calls 
attention of Government to im- 
pending famine, 31 ; his proposals 
for relief of distress, 33 ; split with 
Young Irelanders, 67 ; his gre«t 
speech on Land Question, 68 ; his 
death, 69 ; character of his Parlia- 
mentary supporters, 73, 74, 75, 76 ; 
his attitude towards the Russell 
Ministry, no 

— John, 9, 69, 77, 78, in 
O'Connor and M alone, Messrs., 17 1, 

173 

O'Connor, Mr. Arthur, 335, 336, 337, 

33 8 . 339- 34°. 34 1 - 342. 343. 372, 
441, 471, 492 
O'Conor, Don, The, 362, 519 

— Miss Mary, 474, 476 

— Mr. John, 529 

— Mr. T. P., 370, 372, 441, 491 



57o 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



o'do 

O'Doherty, Kevin Izod, 318 
O'Donnell, Mr. F. H., 271, 272, 273, 

297, 326, 440, 491 
O'Donoghue, The, 235, 374, 441 
O' Donovan (Rossa), Jeremiah, 205, 

208, 218 
' Office Rules,' 169, 175 
O'Flaherty, Anthony, 137, 148 

— Edmund, 137, 143, 150, 160, 161, 
163, 165, 166 

O'Gorman, James, 173 

— Major, 271, 366 

— Mahon. See Mahon, O'Gorman 
O'Grady, Hon. Michael, 181 
O'Hagan, Mr. Justice, 457 

O Kelly, James, 224, 353, 354, 355, 
35 6 - 357. 358, 359. 3 6 °. 3 6l > 3 6 2, 
363. 370, 372, 4". 47i. 492, 547 

O'Leary, John, 208, 319 

— Dr., 265 
Oldham, 550 

' Old Ironsides,' 256 

Omagh, 522 

O'Neill, Edmund, 450 

Opposition, 239, 289 

Orangeism, 194, 248, 249, 318, 372, 

378, 521, 522, 524, 525, 526 
Orange juries, 535 
Orange Press, 393, 524 
Orange meetings, 525 
Orange Toryism, 229 
Orrnsby estate, 169 
O'Rourke, Father, 32, 35, 42, 44, 45, 

47. 48, 49. 5i. 5 2 , 5 6 - 107, 108 
Osborne, Mr. Bernal, 19, 191, 366 
O'Shaughnessy, Mr., 529 
O'Shea, Captain, 372, 496, 497, 531 
O'Sullivan, D., 477 

— W. H. 309, 372, 441, 450, 
492 

' Our Vow, ' 350 

Outrages, agrarian (1880), 412, 413, 
414, 416, 417 

(1844-80), 414. 415 

(1880 and 1881 compared), 480 

(1882), 487 



Pacific Railway, 323 

Paddington, North, 551 

Palace Yard, 238, 324 

Palles, Chief Baron, 250 

Pall Mall, 336, 337 

' Pall Mall Gazette,' 278, 443, 4675 
468, 471, 500, 502, 519, 540, 552 

Palmerston, Lord, 145', 160, 166, 168, 
169, 190, 192, 193, 194 

Papal Aggression, 130 

Paris, 356 

Parliament (British), 3, 4, 6, 14, 16, 
20, 22, 23, 24, 28, 32, 33, 34, 38, 
74, 78, 80, 83, 89, 91, 92, 94, 102, 
104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 113, 114, 
115, 118, 137, 140, 154, 183, 215, 
217, 218, 223, 236, 239, 261, 264, 



PAR 

268, 271, 280, 288, 297, 302, 305, 
306, 310, 312, 315, 316, 342, 343, 
362, 368, 371, 373, 375, 379, 380, 
382, 383, 401, 407, 409, 411, 424, 
425, 427, 429, 432, 437, 440, 446, 
447. 4Si. 452, 453, 454, 455, 457, 
458, 4 6l » 472, 480, 493, 494. 496, 
510. 5". 5 2 5. 526, S 2 7. 528, 529. 
53o, 53i. 54o, 545 

Parliamentarians, 187, 237 

Parliamentary agitation, 69, 241, 278, 
312 

' Parliamentary History of the Irish 
Land Question,' 18, 190 

Parnell, Mr. C. S., 1, 215, 237, 
245, 251 ; contests Dublin County, 
252 ; repugnance to speaking, 253 ; 
history of his family, 254, 255, 256, 
257 ; his early years, 257 ; lessons 
of youth, 258-9, 260 ; hatred of 
cruelty, 259 ; turning point of life, 
260 ; country life, 261 ; how he took 
up Obstruction, 261-2 ; first efforts 
in the House, 262, 263, 267, 268, 

269, 270; nucleus of his party, 271 ; 
wrath of the House, 272 ; motion 
to suspend him, 274, 275 ; opposes 
South Africa Bill, 273, 276, 277 ; 
policy approved in Ireland, 278, 
303, 304 ; explains it at Home Rule 
Conference, 28T ; elected President 
of Home Rule Confederation of 
Great Britain, 283 ; appointed on 
Obstruction Committee, 288 ; fights 
flogging clauses of Army Regula- 
tion Bill, 289 ; opinion of London 
papers about him, 289, 290 ; how 
he became a Land Leaguer, 297, 
304 ; at Westport, 306, 307 ; de- 
clares for ' Peasant Proprietary," 
307 ; advises farmers ' to keep a 
firm grip of their homesteads,' 307, 
308 ; effect of his joining Land 
movement, 308 ; Land League 
founded, 308, 309; visits America, 
309 ; founds American Land League, 
311 ; prepares for Election of 1880, 
311 ; his difficulties as to funds 
and candidates, 312 ; returned for 
Cork City, 313 ; his view as to sup- 
porting Liberals, 314 ; elected 
leader of Parliamentary party, 372 ; 
speaks on Amendment to Queen's 
Speech, 377 ; obtains concession 
from Government, 380 ; difficulty 
as to policy, 385 ; advises farmers 
not to give evidence before Land 
Commission, 386, 387 ; recommends 
boycotting, 387; his justification, 
388 ; his attitude towards Shaw's 
party, 389 ; opinion on ' Three 
F's" and 'Peasant Proprietary,' 
390 ; on ' compensation to land- 
lords,' 391 ; on Irish legislative in- 
dependence, 391, 3< 2 ; trial for 



INDEX 



57i 



PAR 

conspiracy, 395, 396, 397 ; his 
amendment to Queen's Speech 
(1881), 409; misquoted by Glad- 
stone, 428 ; moves that Gladstone 
be no longer heard, 440 ; ' named,' 
ib. ; suspended, 441 ; proposes ab- 
stention from debates, 452 ; attitude 
towards Land Courts, 456, 457, 
458, 459 ; adopts Test Case policy, 
460-1 ; attacked by Gladstone at 
Leeds, 462, 463 ; replies to him at 
Wexford, 463, 464 ; is arrested and 
lodged in Kilmainham, 465, 466 ; 
Gladstone on his arrest, 466, 467 ; 
comments of British Press and 
politicians, 467, 468 ; Irish_Jeeling, 
468, 469, 470 ; Coercion regime 
during his imprisonment, 473, 474, 
475, 476, 478, 479 ; hiTvictory 
over Government in the Kilmain- 
ham treaty, 484, 485 ; Mr. Forster's 
testimony, 486 ; suspension of Irish 
members for opposing Crimes 
Bill, 491 ; his anxiety as to Arrears 
Question, 497 ; speech on the sub- 
ject, 497 ; drafts Mr. Redmond's 
Land Bill, 499 ; Mr. Forster's great 
speech against him, 513 ; its effect 
on the Irish people, 514 ; National 
Tribute started, 514, 515 ; declares 
for Legislative independence, 543 ; 
master of the situation, 555 
Parnell, Tohn, 254, 260 

— Henry, 255 

— Miss Fanny, 260, 276 
• — Mrs. , 260 

• — Sir Henry, 254 

— Sir John, 254 

— Thomas, 254 
Parnell Tribute, 514. 515 
Parnellites, 370, 372, 376, 380, 381, 

3 82 . 43 1 - 44o, 445. 493. 49 6 . 5°7> 

S29. 555 
Party Processions Act, 248 
Patterson, Colonel, 26 
Pat ton, Dr., 523 
' Paul Massey,' 323 
Paymaster of Forces, 255 
Peace Preservation (Ireland) Bill, 

443 
Peasant proprietary, 301, 307, 372, 

390, 453. 4 61 . 4 8 3- 497 
Peel, Mr. F., 144 

— Sir Robert, 4, 6, 8, 9, 15, 22, 24, 
33- 35. 3 8 . 46, 70. 7i. 94. 101, 103, 
no, 113, 114, 191, 192, 193, 194, 
408 

Peclites, 144, 149, 150, 160, 162, 163, 

301. 307 
Pennefather, Judge, 12 
Pennsylvania, 300 
' Pere Goriot,' 246 
Perraud, M. , 175 
Phelan, Mr., 93, 94 
Philadelphia, 352 



QUE 

Phoenix Park murders, 488, 489, 490, 

491, 511, 512, 540, 547 
Phcenix Society, 347 
Pigott, Chief Baron, 177 

Plague of 1846-7, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 

5 8 . 59. 60 
Playfair, Dr. L., 432, 433, 435, 454, 

492, 496 

Plunket, Hon. Mr., 225 

— Lord, 170 

— Lord Chancellor, 3 
Pochin, Mr. H. F., 537 
Polish patriots, 211 
Political prisoners, 299 
Pollock, Mr. Allan, 171 
Pomeroy, 521 

Poor law, 37, 197 

Poor Law Cornmi-sioners' Report of 

1846, 57 
Poor Law inquiry of 1835, 29 
Pope, The, 161 
' Pope's Brass Band,' The, 140, 142, 

145, 147, 150, 155, 161, 162, 167 
Poplar, 313 
Portlaw, 329 
Potato crop, The, 30, 40, 79, 2S2, 

293. 294, 305, 306 

— bhght, 30, 31, 32, 41, 78, 79 
Power, Dr. Maurice, 137, 145 

— Mr. John O'Connor, 245, 271, 
272, 273, 279, 297, 302, 437, 441, 550 

— Mr. Richard, 234, 239, 271, 365, 
366, 372, 491, 492 

Presbyterians, 126, 127, 520, 521, 522 
Prince of Wales, 249, 263 

— Regent, 255 
Pringle, Mr., 519 
Prior, Mr., 17 

Prisoners, Treatment of, 208, 209, 269 
Prisons Bill, 268, 269 
Prisons, Death in (in 1846), 58 
' Privilege ! Privilege ! ' 436 
Procedure Rules, 485 
Protectionist Conservatives, 149 

— party, 38, 70, 230 

Protection of Person and Property 

Bill, 490 
Protestant Irish Church, 2, 190, 191, 

193, 215, 216, 217, 222, 225 

— jurors, 71, 500 

Protestants, 4, 135, 170, 224, 393, 

519, 521, 522, 523, 524 
Prussia, 307 
Purchase Clauses of Land Act, 483, 

497 
Purdon, Mr., 224 



Queen, The, 210, 249, 250, 318, 379 
' Queen v. Parnell,' 169, 171, 172, 182, 

35o 
Queen's Bench (Ireland), 254, 396 

— County, 177, 335, 367, 480 

— Letter re Famine, 117 

— Speech (Session of 1845), 34 



572 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



QUE 

Queen's Speech, Session of 1880, 

376, 380, 577 
Session of 1881, 407, 409, 410, 

415. 4i6 
Queenstown, 206, 311, 365 



Rabagas, 204, 232, 237, 529 
Rack-renting, 17, 116, 290, 291, 309, 

382, 408, 455, 456, 459, 460, 478 
Radicals, 139, 259, 276, 288, 378, 383, 

407, 410, 429, 528, 544, 545, 550 
Raikes, Mr., 273, 275, 288 
Rathdrum, 258 
Rathmines, 523 
Reading, 551 

' Realities of Irish Life,' 174, 197 
Recess of 1880, 385 

— of 1882, 500 

• Record of Traitorism,' 144, 145, 146, 
147, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 165, 
166, 167 

Redistribution Bill, 335, 528, 532 

' Red List,' 254 

Redmond, Mr. J. E., 441, 485, 491, 

499 

— Mr. W., 405 

— Mr. W. H. K., 519 
Reform Act of 1832, 2 
Reginald's Tower, 366 
Registration of voters, 341 

— associations, 521 
Relief Act, 61, 310 

— Committees, 306, 309, 310, 373 

— of Distress Bill, 380, 384 

— works, 46, 50, 51, 52, 62, 63 
Remittances of Irish exiles, 293 
Renan, M., 317 

Rent question, 113, 196, 294, 305, 
306, 409, 417, 452, 453, 456, 457, 
458, 459. 460, 472, 473. 474. 478, 
484, 497, 498, 536, 537, 538, 541 

Repeal, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 
15, 67, J7, 105, 115, 116, 215, 229 

Returns of Irish Crime, 421, 422, 423, 
424, 425, 426, 430, 432 

Reynolds, Miss, imprisoned, 474 

Ribbonmen, 148, 157 

Rio Grande, 354 

Rio Janeiro, 361 

' Road Fever,' 53 

Roche, Mr. (Lord Fermoy), 149 

Roebuck, Mr., 192 

Rogers, Mr. Thorold, 547, 550 

Rome, 69 

Ronayne, Mr. ,261, 265 

Roscommon, 99, 497 

Rosslea, 521 

Rossmore, Lord, 522 

Rotherhithe, 551 

Rotunda, 252, 261, 278 

Routh, Sir R., 48 

Royal Agricultural Society, 31, 199 

— Palace, 342 
Royalty, 264 



SIC 

Rules of Procedure, 485, 496 

— of the House, 267, 342 

— of Urgency, 436, 442, 444 
Russell, Mr. C., 431 

— Mr. George, 550 

— Lord John, 32, 33, 38, 39, 46, 47, 
48, 70, 71, 76, 94, 105, 106, 107, 
108, 109, no, in, 112, 113, 114, 
115, 117, 129, 130, 139, 145, 149 

Russell-Gladstone Ministry, 216 
Russia, 299, 307 



Sadlesr, James, 148, 163, 167 

— John, 131, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 
142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 
x 53i J 55, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 
165, 166, 210, 219, 278, 353 

Sadleir's Bank, 137, 161, 163, 164 
St. George's Club, 342 

— in the East, 551 

St. Stephen's Green, 364 
Salford, 213, 214, 550 
Salisbury, Lord, 116, 496 
Sandeau, M. Jules, 63 
San Francisco, 207 
'Saturday Review,' 202 
' Saunders' News Letter,' 82 
Saunderson, Major, 522 
Scotch landlords, 103 

— press, 467 

— tenants, 196, 197 
Scotchmen, 48, 311, 553 
Scotland, 103, 107, 282, 292, 300, 305, 

313, 315, 468, 536, 537, 543, 549, 

55i. 555 

— division of Liverpool, 555 
'Scotsman,' 471 

Scrope, Mr. Poulett, 18 
Scully, Mr. Frank, 137, 148 

— Mr. Vincent, 137, 145, 148 

— Mr. William, 220, 221 
Secret societies, 206 
Sclborne, Lord, 458 

Senior, Mr. Nassau, 195, 196, 197, 

198 
Sergeant-at-Arms. See Gosset 
Sexton, Mr. Thomas, 244, 326, 327, 

328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 

335. 366. 372, 395. 401. 434, 441, 

471, 482, 491, 493, 495 
Shaw-Lefevre, Mr., 434, 551 
Shaw, Mr. William 237, 313, 365, 

370, 371. 372, 373. 376' 378, 379.V* 
Shea, Mary, 175 
Shee, Serjeant, 189, 191 
Sheehy, Father, 450, 460 
Sheerin, James, 169 
Sheil, Mr., M.P., 231, 271, 492 

— Richard Lalor, 76, no 
Sheridan, General, 356, 357 

— H. B., 269 

Sherlock, Mr. T. , 255, 256, 257 

— Serjeant, 235 
Sickles, General, 361 



INDEX 



573 



SIM 

Simon, Serjeant, 429 

Sinclair, Mr., M.P., 533 

Sioux Ind'ans, 361 

Sitting Bull, 361 

Skibbereen, 44, 52, 61, 64, 205 

Sligo, 160, 331, 332, 437, 480, 427, 

— Marquis of, 171 

Smith, Mr. W. H., 483, 486, 540 

Smith wick, Mr., 372, 441 

Smyth, Mr. P. J., 226, 235, 372, 529 

Solicitor-General for Ireland, 159 

Somerville, Sir W. , 109, hi 

' Song from the Backwoods,' 347 

Soudan, 260 

' Soupers,' 170 

' Soup Kitchen Act,' 62, 63, 107, 122 

South Africa, 268, 272, 273, 276, 277, 

376 
Southwark School Board, 341 
Speaker, The (Sir H. Brand), 242, 
243, 274, 275, 276, 288, 334, 335, 
338, 342, 353, 377, 380, 420, 428, 

43 2 . 433. 435- 43 6 . 437. 43 8 , 439 
Special magistrates. See Magistrates 
Spencer, Lord, 475, 500, 509, 517, 

518, 524, 525, 526, 532, 534, 535, 

536. 537. 540, 546 
Standard,' 467, 536, 537, 552 
Stanley, Lord, 17, 18, 25, 35 

— Mr. Lyulph, 550 

State trials, 212, 223, 230, 395, 396 
Statistical Society of Dublin, 209 
Stephens, Mr. James, 205, 208, 212 
Stevens, Mr., 164 
Stewart, Commodore, 255, 256, 257 

— Miss, 255 
Stockport, 550 
Storey, Mr., M.P., 548 
Straide, 298 

Strangers' Gallery, 433, 495 

Sub-Commissioners under Land Act, 
458 

Sub-letting Act, 19 

Sullivan, A. M., 40, 42, 44, 45, 50, 
124, 150, 164, 169, 181, 187, 215, 
221, 224, 232, 251, 252, 264, 270, 
271. 297, 330, 343, 346, 353, 362, 

439, 44C 44i 

— D. B., 330 

— Sir Edward, 510 

— T. D., 144, 145, 146, 149, 154, 
156, 157, 158, 159, 165, 166, 167, 
187, 214, 332, 345, 346, 347, 348, 

349. 35o, 35L 352, 353. 372, 395- 

441, 491, 492 
Suspects, 497 
Suspension of Evictions Bill, 379, 380, 

382. 383 

— of Irish Members, 441, 491 
Sweeney, 209 

Swift, Dean, 'Modest Proposal,' 17, 

25 

— Mr. Richard, 162 
Synan, Mr., 372 



TYR 

' Tablet,' 147 
Talbot, T. R.,423 
Tara, 5, 6 
Taylor, Colonel, 252, 253 

— Mr. , 235 

Tenant League, 127, 128, 129, 130, 

142, 145; 147. J 49> I 5 I . I 5 2 . 153- 
161, 187, 191, 215 

— right, 5, 33, 106, 109, no, in, 
126, 127, 130, 138, 139, 142, 149, 
192, 210, 520 

— Right Bills, 188, 189, 194, 235 
Tenants, Irish, 17, 18, 19, 28, 29, 40, 

64, 108, 194, 225, 291, 292, 295, 301, 

306, 307, 372, 379. 3 81 . 3 8 4. 3 8 8. 
390, 391, 395, 4°7. 4 12 , 445. 45 1 . 
453. 454. 455. 456, 457. 458, 459, 
460, 461, 474, 478, 483. 485. 488, 
497, 498, 499, 53 6 > 537. 554 

Test-case policy, 459, 460. 4 6l > 4°3 

Texas, 355 

Thomasson, Mr., 550 

Thomond, Marquis of, 72 

Thompson, T. C, 43 2 - S4 8 
Thorn's Almanac, '119, 120, 122, 292 
' Three F's,' The, 127, 222, 301, 304, 

307. 389. 39°. 409 
Thurles, 164 

'Times,' The, 104, 200, 201, 255, 321, 

375. 394. 488, 489. 5 I 3- 523. 53°. 

539, 545, 546 
Tipperary, 81, 82, 124, 137, I4 8 , 164, 

218, 219, 221, 251, 365, 418, 422, 

423, 477, 481 

— Bank, 136, 137, 161, 163, 164 

Tithes, 1, 447, 45° 

Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 207 

Tories, 70, 147. 238, 240, 250, 275, 

310, 313, 381, 519. 526, 540. 548. 

552. 555 
Torrens, Judge, 166 
Tory Ministry, 425 

— Opposition, 381 

— papers, 467 
Townley, Mr., 160 
Traill, Major, 448, 449, 45* 
Tralee, 374 

Tramway scheme, 245, 246 
Transvaal, 268, 273 
Traversers, 395 
Treason Felony Act, 114 
Treasury, 46, 51, 7°. 343, 537 

— Bench, 244, 265, 272, 379, 407. 434 
Treaty of Ghent, 255 
Trelawney, Mr., 112 

Trench, Mr. F., 196 

— Mr. S., 175, 176, 196, 197, 227 
Trevelyan, Mr. (afterwards Sir C), 

51. JI 7 

— Mr. G. O., 328, 475, 47 6 , 495. 
496, 498, 516, 517, 518, 525, 526, 
53°. 537. 54o, 546 

Trinity College, 229 
Tuke, Mr., 44, 56 
TyTone, 554 



574 



THE PARNELL MOVEMENT 



ULS 

Ulster, 82, 126, 127, 290, 474, 518, 
519, 520, 521, 523 

— Custom, ii2, 126, 189, 389 

— Nationalists, 521 

— Presbyterians, 251, 520 

— tenant right, 191, 235, 457 
Union, Act of, 20, 26, 27, 116, 117, 

185, 188, 292, 455, 556, 557 
■ United Ireland,' 247, 312, 477, 507, 

508, 509, 513, 514 537, 538, 555 
United Irishmen, 520 

— States, 355, 357, 361 
Unlawful Oaths Act, 25 

Urgency resolutions, 439, 442, 443, 
444 



Vatican, 15, 514 
Victorian Parliament, 367 
Votes of Censure, 532, 533 



Walsh, J. W., 405 

War Office, 272, 336, 337, 339 

Warton, Mr., 379 

Washington, 255, 309 

Waste lands, 17, 18, 25, 106 

Water Bill, 310 

' Waterdale neighbours,' 323 

Waterford, 55, 137, 328, 329, 330, 

33 1 . 3 6 5. 3 66 . 476 

— and Limerick Company, 327 
' Weekly Dispatch,' 555 

' Weekly Irish Times, 469, 470 
' Weekly News,' 361 
Wellington, Duke of, 6, 8, 17 
Westby, Mr., 172 
' Western Morning News,' 538 
Westmeath, 148, 157, 226, 243, 351, 
515, 517, 518 

— Lord, 157, 159 
Westminster, 218, 292, 406 

— Duke of, 544 

■ Westminster Review,' 322 
Westport, 43, 56, 306 



ZUL 

Wexford, 400, 405, 463 

'Wexford People,' 167 

Whalley, Mr., 276 

Whately, Archbishop, 104, 123, 195 

198 
Whiggery, 249, 313, 510, 519, 520 
Whigs, 3, 38, 70, 71, 75, 147, 148, 

226, 238, 239, 240, 250, 316, 493, 

Si8, 544 
White, Father, 173 
Whiteboy Act, 24, 403, 406, 477 
Whitworth, Mr., 449 

— Mr. B., 313, 449, 530 
Whyte, — , 209 
Wicklow, 252, 258, 261, 368 
Widnes, 551 

Wilde, Sir W., 124 
Wilkinson, Mr., 163, 164 
Wills, Mr. W. H., 545, 546 
Wilson, Mr. A. J., 119 

— Mr. John, 299 
Wiseman, Cardinal, 130 
Wishaw, Rev. Mr., 257 
Wolseley, General, 361 

Women, treatment of, under Coercion- 

Acts, 473, 474, 475, 476 
Woodward, Bishop, 17 
•World' (Dublin), 70 
■ World,' The (London), 289, 290 
Wrangel, Field-Marshal, 256 
Wynne, Captain, 42 



Yeo, Colonel, 258 

Yeovil, 257 

Yorkshire, South, 429 

' Young Ireland' (book), 5, 9, 13 

' Young Ireland ' (periodical), 330 

Young Ireland Party, 10, n, 15, 67,. 

69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 79, no, in, 138,. 

261, 317, 318, 345, 364, 369, 505 



Zulu difficulty, 310 



flAR -0 1943 



r d LIBRARY OF CUNUHtib (V/l 



